Researchers have differed in defining childhood and setting its bounds. Some of these definitions were gathered by Abdel Salam Al-Nubi in his book \"An Introduction to Childcare\", which may be consulted, and books on upbringing note that this stage of a person's life received the attention it deserves only at the start of this century.
\nSome philosophers and scholars had tried to observe their own children and record information about their development, as did Darwin, who published in 1877 an article on observations he recorded while watching his son Doddy. At roughly the same time the philosopher William Preyer was recording observations of his son regularly three times a day, from birth until the age of three, and published them in 1881 in a book entitled \"The Mind of the Child\". Alfred Binet and his intelligence tests made a distinctive contribution to measuring children's intelligence.
\nThese efforts and others prompted Chrisman in 1893 to give the field of such studies the term \"paedology\", the science of the child, in which a number of pioneers stood out, among them Jean Piaget in Switzerland, Wallon in France and Gesell in America. With the issuing of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child on 20\/11\/1959, the course of recognising childhood and its rights took a new turn, one result of which was that the child became a subject of study in each of their early years and from several angles (1).
\nWe conclude that the child has become the pivot of modern education: the starting point, the pivot and the end, as John Dewey put it in his book \"The School and Society\".
\n3. The importance of upbringing at home:
\nAfter these studies it became clear to all how important the stage of childhood is in a person's life, and how important the family's role is in bringing up its children.
\nSome educationalists had stressed the importance of the family's role, such as Pestalozzi, Froebel and Burt, as had sociologists and psychologists.
\nThe home is the first educational institution to embrace the individual as a child, an adolescent and a young adult; it lays the foundations for the unfolding of their character, and in it their future is decided.
\nModern education stresses the importance of upbringing at home in planting sound foundations, whether through the relationship of the family's members with the child, be it authoritarian, democratic, chaotic or neglectful, or through the child's relationship with others, in which they may be fearful, hesitant, changeable or aggressive. At home the child absorbs concepts and rules of behaviour and acquires the units of measure by which they will weigh matters and judge them.
\nAt home the child comes to love or to dislike certain principles, such as freedom, cooperation and activity, and so on.
\nAll researchers agree that the home is the best place for bringing up children, and that the mother's educational role is the prominent role in her life and in her child's life.
\n4. Difficult choices:
\nWe observe that most new mothers today cannot perform their role towards their child as fully as they should if they rely only on their simple experience and on the general information drawn from their own mother or their neighbours, and that most of the rules of upbringing they were raised on or have heard are not firmly established, and
\n1. See on this the research and studies of Murphy, Smith,
\nResenblum, Barnstem, Kessen, StoneBell, Stern, Kennel, Lewis\u2026..
\nand many others
\nat best they can use this information only to face a few of the following problems:
\nkeeping the newborn clean, giving them their meals, setting their sleeping times and the like. They soon discover that the care their child needs is not only this, but that their needs will change from month to month and from year to year, and will also vary so as to include the physical, psychological, mental and social sides, since upbringing is the comprehensive and integrated care of the individual.
\nShe is before a new creature who is, at the very least, a mass of latent abilities and aptitudes waiting to grow and mature in order to express themselves. What does she know about these latent abilities? What must she do to help them grow, mature and unfold? How does she know whether the rate of growth is the right one for this period or that? And how does she tell health from illness?
\nAt another stage, how does she distinguish what is beneficial for the child from what is harmful? Which behaviour must she encourage, which must she dissuade them from, and which must she ignore? And how does she dissuade them: by prevention, by repression or by persuasion? How does she train them in good habits, and how do we judge that these habits are good and others bad?
\nFrom these questions we see that upbringing is no longer that simple experience a mother passes on to her daughter, but has become a science that is taught, an expertise that is acquired and a role for which a young woman is well prepared. We recall the saying: \"If you want to raise a child, raise his mother twenty years before his birth\", or \"A child's upbringing begins twenty years before his birth\".
\n5. The difficulty:
\nIf we feel the ground beneath our feet and look closely at the basic elements that make up our upbringing at home, we are struck by the many contradictions that govern it. It is a strange and remarkable mixture in which the contemporary lives alongside the modern and alongside the old, with differing degrees of age.
\nFrom this coexistence a blend is formed which, at the least, can be said to have no colour, taste or scent. We will try to reduce the causes of this contradictory blend to three difficulties.
\na. The first difficulty:
\nThe absence of intellectual method in our upbringing, or rather the dominance of vagueness in our intellectual approach to building the human being, unless we regard the vagueness of the method as itself an educational method.
\nI said that our upbringing at home is a blend of contradictory elements, bringing together elements of the rational method, which begins with universals and moves to particulars; elements of the realist or empirical method, which begins with particulars and ends with a general law; elements of the historical method, which traces a phenomenon back to its origin and development; and elements of the critical method, which highlights the negative and positive points of a subject. We take pride in this deliberate mixing, saying that we freely choose what appeals to us and what suits our reality. The truth is that this fine-sounding claim, built outwardly on freedom of choice, has an appeal that conceals behind it a dangerous intellectual confusion, which we dress in the garb of a new method we call \"the selective method\", one that collapses at the first shock it meets and whose fragility shows at the first objective discussion of it.
\nThis mixing of methods is no simple matter, since it produces a confusion of concepts and a shaking of values. This means that the elements that supported the stability of the Arab family in the past, namely unity of concepts and values, have now disappeared, so the family's stability has been shaken, its view ahead has become unclear, and it finds it hard to adopt new concepts that contradict its roots or to replace old relationships with modern ones.
\nThis mixing of methods is no simple matter, since it produces a confusion of concepts and a shaking of values. This means that the elements that supported the stability of the Arab family in the past, namely unity of concepts and values, have now disappeared, so the family's stability has been shaken, its view ahead has become unclear, and it finds it hard to adopt new concepts whose roots are contradictory or to replace old relationships with modern ones.
\nIn our view the family is in an educational impasse over its choice of values and culture, and it is as if it were posing the following questions:
\nBy what system of values shall I raise my children, and therefore within what culture? The choice is not theoretical but real and practical.
\nIt flounders in a state of indecision, between the old and the modern, between imitation and renewal, between following and independent judgement, between constancy and change.
\nb. The second difficulty:
\nRaising the child according to which concept of upbringing: the old or the modern?
\nThe old concept of upbringing rests on a particular idea of human nature, dividing the human being into the duality of spirit and body and of good and evil, with the role of upbringing being to develop the good side and restrain the evil one. In books on upbringing you will find a detailed exposition of this concept.
\nThe modern concept of upbringing rests on another idea of human nature, whose substance is that the human being is a developing creature made up of latent abilities and aptitudes, which upbringing works to discover and develop to the utmost.
\nEach of these two concepts has its foundations, methods, tools and aims. The theoretical choice may be easy, but upbringing is an applied science, and so the choice is extremely difficult for those with knowledge, let alone for everyone else.
\nc. The third difficulty:
\nLooking closely and carefully at the reality of the Arab family in general and the Libyan family in particular, I do not find a problem that can be called an educational problem; rather there is something far beyond that, something we might call educational backwardness, and there is a difference between a problem and backwardness.
\nAn educational problem exists in every society, advanced or backward. It is an unclear situation felt by a number of people, who then seek to solve it, choosing their tools and means.
\nBackwardness, by contrast, is a hazy or darkened state. It is walking through a pitch-black night in which there is no difference between the sighted and the blind: everyone gropes for the way, everyone is bound by the blackness of the night, shackled by chains of restrictions, by a heritage of traditions, by ropes of illusions.
\nIt is a state in which the individual feels that all is well, wearing the garb of contentment over an inner idleness, content with his condition and clinging to his situation: he does not feel his own backwardness.
\nAnd if we suppose that a few do feel the backwardness, for one reason or another, we find that they also feel powerless to find a solution.
\nEducational backwardness, in our view, is a state that precedes the educational problem by a long time and may last for years or for whole eras.
\nThe state of having a problem, by contrast, is an advanced state: it is the stage of awareness, and when that awareness spreads, those who hold it seek solutions to the problems, and a renaissance follows.
\nProblems continue, and indeed multiply, with the renaissance, and the solutions continue and grow more varied.
\nThe state of backwardness is stagnation and a minimum of tension, whereas a renaissance is constant activity and constant movement. The difference between the two is like the difference between the stillness of ignorance and the restlessness of knowledge: awareness unaccompanied by process and movement is a continuation of backwardness, a backward awareness.
\n6. Conclusion:
\nIn conclusion, the family is in an educational impasse as a result of these three difficulties:
\nThe Arab family's information about the child is in general confused, uneasy and disturbed; its educational method is vague and confused; its choice of values is changeable, wavering and unsettled; and the relationship between the family and the child is authoritarian and repressive. Faced with these facts, what do we expect our generations to become? Shifting ground does not grow tall trees.
\nIn closing this modest study, we believe that the steps towards a remedy begin with the following:
\nFirst: establishing a centre for childhood research and studies, with an annual budget we do not aspire to exceed the price of one modern tank.
\nSecond: creating childcare centres in neighbourhoods and villages, supervised by educationalists and technical staff, to make use of children's free time by developing their talents and abilities.
\nThird: cooperating with the international organisations concerned with childhood, such as UNICEF, and drawing up joint programmes to be carried out throughout the country.
\nFourth: making the family aware of its educational role through direct meetings and through varied programmes on the visual and audio broadcasters (television and radio).
\nFifth: replacing the philosophy of the child's relationship with the mosque, built on the idea that the mosque is a place for prayer and memorising the Qur'an alone, with a new relationship built on the idea that it is also a place for social, cultural and even recreational activities.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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