A School on Mount Carmel: News of the Haifa Bahá'í School

The June 1921 issue of the *Star of the West* carried a brief but warm report from Haifa: the small school for Bahá'í children that had been begun on the slope of Mount Carmel, near the houses of the believers, was now in regular session with eighteen pupils, two teachers, and the personal blessing of 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

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The school had grown out of the Master's repeated insistence, in Tablets and talks across the previous twenty years, that the universal education of children — irrespective of family station, gender, or means — was the foundation of any civilization the Bahá'í Faith might in time help to build. He had told audiences in Paris and London and across the United States that the educational neglect of any child was a crime against the future.

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He had said this so often that the Western friends had begun to ask, in their letters to Haifa, what the Master Himself was doing about the children of His own community.

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The Haifa school was the answer. It had been organised by the local Bahá'í friends — Persian, Arab, and a handful of European — and had begun in a small rented room near the houses of the believers on the slope. The eighteen children included sons and daughters of the Persian Bahá'í families who had settled in Haifa, the Arab Bahá'í families who had joined them, and a few children of mixed background. The medium of instruction was Persian, with daily Arabic, and weekly sessions in English for those families who wished it.

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> These children are, as it were, the seeds of the future world.

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The phrase, attributed in the *Star's* report to a recent Tablet of the Master, gave the framing for the school's small program. The mornings were given to reading, writing, arithmetic and history. The afternoons were given to physical education, gardening, and a daily devotional in which the children chanted prayers in Persian and Arabic. The teachers worked without salary; the families contributed what they could to the costs of room and books.

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The *Star's* editors printed the report partly as information and partly as a challenge. The American friends were being asked, by way of the small school in Haifa, to ask themselves what they were doing about the children of their own communities. The first American Bahá'í Sunday schools — the small Children's Classes that would in time become the strong educational programmes of the Faith — owe something of their first impulse to the small report from Haifa printed in the *Star* in June 1921.

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