EDUCATION IN PALESTINE

Hokitika Guardian, 7 January 1929, Page 2

EDUCATION IN PALESTINE

THE HEBREW LANGUAGE. e—<% FUTURE OF ARAB AND JEW BRIGHT, (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, Jan. 3. “Education in Palestine” was the subject of a lecture delivered before the Anglo-Palestine Club by Mr Humphrey Bowman, Director of Education under the Palestine Government. Mr Bowman said that when the country was part of the Turkish Empire, there was no national system of education in Palestine. It was not until 1913 that the Turks made any attempt to form one, an d the war stopped any development of it. The language in the schools, at, that time, was Turkish, which was a foreign language to the children, and there was no school in which Hebrew was a medium of instruction. In 1914 a Zionist organisation took over control of the Jewish schools and very soon there were forty schools in which Hebrew was the language of instruction. In 1920 a new British executive took over the former Turkish schools, and left the Zionist organisation to look after the Jewish schools, and thus the country had a dual national system of education. The relationship between the Zionist educational organisation and Government, said the speaker, was now oetter than it had ever been, and the most difficult question was that of finance. The financial situation in the Jewish schools had been extremely unsatisfactory for several years, but he believed that the burden of debt was being gradually diminished. He believed Chat, despite the antipathies and set-backs, Palestine would advance and would be built up by the generation at present at school. Schools were teaching citizenship, and in the future they would find the Arab and the Jew working side by side for the good of tbo country.