• Arab Children and the Impasse of the Future

Arab Children

What can children do in our Arab world with the sky so low above them?

How can they raise their heads to their full height?

How can they contemplate distant horizons without a wide enough space to enable them to take off?

Arab children, not the children of Palestine alone, are besieged, and because they are the material of the future, this means that the whole Arab future is besieged. The space for creativity in it is narrow, and the scope allowed for inventiveness is almost nil. Who is responsible for all this?

The responsibility for the siege in which Arab children are living in shared between several quarters, foremost of which are the family system, the educational establishment, cultural and information institutions and the gap of backwardness in which we are living and which we are content as if it were an inevitable fate.

Arab children are born with the same degree of intelligence as other children in the world, and like them they pass through the different stages of growth until the years of interaction between them and their environment begin. At this turning-point begins the dangerous separation of the ways. Western children, for example, continue the phases of their psychological and physical growth, and all the circumstances needed for creativity are prepared for them, if they have the seeds of creativity within them. However, the turning-point for Arab children stops, or takes a downward turn. Either the seeds of creativity and renewal die within them, or they have to have a combative spirit in order simply to remain floating on the surface without being threatened by drowning. This may be the explanation for the example of creative Arab scientists who found an escape route to flee from under this low sky. They raised themselves to their full height and soared high in the sky of creativity outside their countries.

Backwardness is certainly not a feature of the Arab character, but it is a fact which imposes itself on us and we usually accept it despairingly and despondently. Our children inherit it from us together with our loftier noble qualities. So what is to be done, and how long will Arab children remain creative abroad and impotent at home? And how can we raise up this sky a bit, which continues to lower itself above our children's heads?

Sniping at the Future

We must realize that Arab children are our squandered wealth. If we are not aware of their importance, our enemies are well aware of it. When the soldiers of the Israeli occupation open fire, their first target is Palestinian children. They do not try to wound them or disperse them, but employ their military skill, as the best army in the Middle East, to hit them directly in the head. That is, they try to eradicate the Palestinian future with every bullet they fire. Israel became aware of the importance of killing Palestinian children somewhat belatedly. Before that it was preoccupied with seizing land, eradicating Palestinian villages and establishing colonial settlements on the stolen land, until it discovered that all this is meaningless as long as there is a Palestinian generation growing up day by day and demanding their rights to existence, their land and their history. The Israelis were terrified by the existence of this generation in the first Palestinian Intifada in the 1980s, when a whole generation of young people and children rose up, who had been born and lived under the occupation and refused to accept it as an accomplished fact. Israel has realized since that time that the most dangerous thing they are facing is this population bomb which keeps exploding to confront its expansionist designs. Although this bomb is exploding today among children of the occupied territories, tomorrow it will explode among the Arabs inside the Green Line who have Israeli nationality and live as second-class citizens inside the state of Israel. It is expressing its fear within a massive propaganda campaign about savage children who purposely push their children towards death.

We do not kill our children as Israel alleges, but at least we kill an aspect of their childhood. The great majority of Arab children live without a real childhood and grow old prematurely. They are fuel for all the inter-Arab wars, and they are victims of poverty which deprives them of their right to education and throws them early into the labor markets. Even those who have chances for an education and advancement fall victims to the backward educational system which kills whatever creativity they may have within them and plant in them fear and suspicion of this earthly life.

Talent & Official Education

The great scientist Einstein believed that education in its organized form obstructs the emergence of genius rather than supporting it. This small plant in the spirit of each child needs freedom, and to satisfy its love for sacred investigation. But official methods of education are only reinforced by means of repression and a feeling of duty. This bitter criticism of official education by a great scientist reveals one aspect of genius that has a distaste for all kinds of restrictions. In spite of the great achievements that Einstein offered in the realm of physics and the theory of relativity which was a new breakthrough in the view of universal phenomena, his regular education did not go beyond a bachelor's degree. He did not have a great quantity of certificates which he could proudly hang on the wall, and even the doctorate which he obtained later was not gained by a massive thesis stuffed to the point of nausea as happens in our universities. He obtained it for an article which scientists do not regard as one of his best articles.

What do you think Einstein would say about our Arab educational systems, which not only strangle freedom, but even kill it on purpose? They are systems which rely on stuffing and inculcating various curricula most of which are written by officials. They also lack any dimension which links them with social and cultural reality. On top of all that they do not leave any scope for children to express their personal inclinations. It is an educational system that is suitable for educating anything except individualist personalities. It concentrates on instilling in them the virtue of submission, and removes from within them the faculties of criticism and analysis. Consequently, it deprives them of democratic education and makes them into a group of employees who are subject to everything that is instilled in them or all orders that they are given.

Even official education in advanced countries has also been subjected to a kind of severe criticism, even if for a different purpose. Some specialists in the study of creativity affirm that some kinds of official education can strengthen creative development, but more academic education than necessary can plant many traditional and conservative ideas in students' minds, which make them unable to follow up processes of originality or desire to innovate. These specialists insist that the methods of self-education are the ideal solution for people with special talents, but where can one find such institutions in our Arab world. Where is the scientific, artistic or cultural activity which can attract creative talents, polish them and provide them with the necessary skills, without the restrictions of school and university?

The Family under Siege

Arab families are in a better situation than many Western families in terms of their social cohesion. But they have few potentials and their room to move is limited. There are no institutions to help them or laws to protect them economically or politically. Consequently, there are often ineffective, and cannot provide their members with any kind of protection. All that they can do is give them a degree of affection and love and then push them naked to confront their fates in an extremely difficult world. Most famous Arabs whom we know have suffered a great deal in the struggle simply to survive, and that has used up most of the years of their youth, before they tasted success when they were at the threshold of old age. The figures published by humanitarian organizations of Arab children who are pushed into the labor market early on in their tender years are horrifying. There are small children who support whole families in the countryside in many Arab countries. A few months ago the United States forbade several deals for ready-made clothing from one of the Arab countries because it discovered that those working in the factories which produced them were children below the working age. We are facing a situation in which children's childhood is being deliberately killed, and one of their basic rights, namely education, is being destroyed.

Lest we do an injustice to Arab families, the situation is also not good in Western families. The pressures of living have generated a kind of breakdown in contact between the different generations. In a study on the time that parents spend talking seriously to their children, statistics from Holland indicated that they do not spend more than a mere 11 seconds a day. American children are more fortunate, because they talk to their parents for one minute per day. Professor Paul Fowler, a specialist in the study of childhood, says that this is not a matter of time only, but also includes the quality of conversation that parents have with their children. Some parents resort at times to brusque answers and at other times to ridiculous ones when replying to their children. This is apart from fits of anger and calling what their children say stupid. All this generates a kind of negative feeling among children and makes them lose self-confidence and feel constant loneliness.

Children need to discuss and exchange ideas with older people, because this develops their method of thinking freely and their confidence in the ideas they put forward. Several researches have established that children who receive support and encouragement from their parents are happier and concentrate more when studying. Parents who offer support are divided into two types: the first type tries to create self-motivation in their children, and the second type is content to help the children with what they are interested in and does not cease praising them whatever standard they achieve. Children of the latter type are happier but they achieve little, in contrast to the former group.

Television Children

Education of children is no longer confined only to the family or the educational establishment. Modern technology and the amazing machines it produces have come to have a greater share. Lillian Lorsa, a psychologist in the American National Institute, says that if we want to understand children today, we must know that they have become television watchers before being pupils. The danger of television is that it not only affects what they obtain from studying. It has been established that those who spend more than one hour and a half each day in from of the small screen have a lower standard in reading, writing and dealing with mathematics, and become scatter-brained and lack concentration in class. But television also affects children's personalities. At a time when their personalities are being formed, they become saturated with images which they see on the screen. This saturation is the beginning of the imitation which happens unconsciously. Children thereby lose their conscious awareness of everything they are doing. We may recall the child who threw himself off one of the tall buildings in Cairo in order to prove that he could imitate "the Amazing Farafiro, a cartoon mouse who knows how to fly. Television also steals childhood away from children, and takes them prematurely into the world of adults with all its problems and contradictions, indeed it takes them into a world of violence whose justification they do not understand. This is clearly apparent from children's paintings, which used to be innocent and full of dreams, and then became transformed after they saw television into harsh images full of monsters and robots. Statistics show that children who watch television for three hours a day will have witnessed about 800 murders and more than 100,000 scenes of violence by the age of twelve.

In Order to Save the Future

To sum up, we are facing a situation which is not only suffocating creative children, it also does not allow ordinary children to take their fair share of childhood experiences. The oppressive Arab environment deprives them of many neural and sensory stimulants which develop their degree of awareness of existence around them. The educational establishment bears a heavy load of this responsibility, because it is one of the most important factors it development. It should renounce its role of inculcating, and act to educate creative abilities. The theory that a child is creative by innate character, that he is born equipped with talent, is finished. It has become clear that creativity can be formed and developed. The development of any special abilities depends on the effort which is made in this direction. By creativity I do not mean here adult creativity. Children's creativity is certainly different. Children at this stage cannot come up with something new, but what they come up with will be new for them. This in itself is an indication of creativity to come, indeed the appearance of independence is in itself a creative act. A school should nourish in its children a love of investigation, vitality, artistic imagination, and the inclination to be active and research. Such characteristics are the prime movers to develop creativity. Perhaps the greatest problem that an Arab student faces at school, and indeed also at university, is the lack of the method of research and investigation, that is, the lack of a search for truth. This represents here an almost total lack in our educational establishments of the forms of work and ways of thinking and problem-solving in the curricula of all phases of education. The problem here lies in the kind and extent of freedom ensured for children and young people.

The Impasse of the Middle Class

Scientists who are concerned with studying creative people and geniuses have noticed that the majority of them (about 80%) come from middle-class families. The middle class has always been the safety valve for any society. The progress of society is measured by the amount of educated skilled people, creative talents, leaders and new ideas that this class offers. Marxist thinkers have persistently said that it is an anxious class, which always looks at the aristocratic class above it, and is afraid of falling into the abyss of the working class below it. This desire and anxiety, which go together, are what have brought about this intellectual and creative activity in this class. The Arab middle class has been surrounded by danger for many years. It is slowly but continuously sliding into the abyss of poverty. Instead of being a safety valve in society, it is being turned into a victim which threatens society with danger to its security and progress. It is not only losing its special characteristics, it is also losing the values which it used to teach to its children about the merit of work, the importance of learning and ambition for a better status. All these are things that create motivations among individuals. Restrictions on individual liberty still exist in many of our Arab regimes, which hamper the movement of this class and do not preserve the rights of its individuals. This threatens it with paralysis and erosion. Consequently, the skilled, educated people, leaders, thinkers and scholars produced by this class are also threatened with erosion.

The Arab world, after the opening up of outer space, can no longer hide what is broadcast on satellite channels. The state has become powerless to impose its traditional censorship, leaving this task to the family. It is an extremely difficult task. The satellite channels bring us a colored dream of a very dazzling advanced world which is extremely free and open. It not only clashes with our traditional conservative feelings, but also makes us impotent to resist all this flow of different values and customs. The Arab family has come to bear this responsibility on its own. It has to draw up a resolute policy to confront this machine, and to make good use of it. Television, whether we like it or not, is part of children's lives. The family's task is to make the hours they spend in front of it useful in some way. Some studies indicate that children can gain many language skills. In some Arab families that cannot buy books or newspapers, television is the only source of culture. Psychologists affirm that we should turn off the television when there are any violent scenes, since they stay with children when they are asleep, but they are afraid that is they say so they will be forbidden to watch it. The school is also responsible for making children understand how to differentiate between the picture that they see and the reality which they are living.

This is a quick survey of the situation of Arab children and an earnest appeal to all responsible agencies to save the Arab future, not only from the hands of the Israeli soldiers, but also from the oppression of backward systems and from bogus festivals headed by first ladies which do not offer anything real. We need comprehensive reformist action in which experts, educators and news media people co-operate, so that we may save something of the creativity of the Arab mind while it is still in the cradle.

As Arabs we are standing today in front of an impasse, and we do not have the time to wait any longer than we have done. We must take matters firmly in hand. We believe confidently that our future as a nation and countries is organically linked to the extent to which we succeed in placing our children on the right path. We should concentrate all our potentials and devote all our development programs to the children: modern education, preservation of rights, provision of excellent health care, protecting them with laws and enforcing these well against any attack on their right to all that. We believe that our children's rights come before our rights as parents and officials, and that we are planting in our children the renaissance desired for our nation.

Sulaiman Al-Askary

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