Page 52 - Personal Column (Charles Belgrave)_Neat

his cool common sense in a difficult post, especially during the war
years.
By 1926 two schools existed; a second 011c had been opened in
Manama, but both of them were patronized entirely by Sunnis. In 1928
I suggested to the Shaikh that we should have a school for Shias in
Manama, where there was a large Shia community. ’There is a school
in Manama, the Shias can go to it,’ he said, when I made the suggestion.
'But,.Your Highness, the Shias won’t go to a school where all the teachers
are Sunnis,’ I said. I suggested asking the Shias to contribute something
towards the cost of the building and the Shaikh agreed that if they did so
a school could be built and opened. The Shia community was poor but
they put up a few thousand rupees as a token contribution and the
building was started. Having opened the Shia school we had to set up a
Shia committee, which was difficult as the Shias were even less educated
than the Sunnis—neither of them knew anything about school manage­
ment. After some years of very unsatisfactory school administration we
decided that the Government should take over control of the schools.
One committee had given up all interest in education when the Govern­
Shop in Manama, old style ment laid down what the pay and conditions of teachers should be, thus
putting a stop to a certain amount of nepotism; the other committee,
Modern shops and offices
after quarrelling violently among themselves, had faded out. The Shaikh
Photo: Bahrain Petroleum Cn.
“ . .Iw - - appointed his brother, Shaikh Abdulla, as ‘Minister’ of Education and he
■!* and I, with the help of a Lebanese Inspector of Education from Beirut,
o:
tackled the thorny problem of education. By 1937 there were three town .
■
schools and five village schools, attended by about 1000 boys. There was
m no difficulty in getting the boys to come to school, our difficulty was to
find teachers.
If, as Lord Brougham said, ‘Education makes a people easy to lead,
but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave’, then
■ .ss there must have been something radically wrong with education in
. . . Bahrain. The ‘educated’ young men were certainly easily led, by the
f ■£-. wrong people, they resented any form of discipline or government and
it was the schoolboys who first introduced the habit of std^es. Education
! . • ry V
was, and is still, regarded solely as the means to. enable a young man to
cam more money; I only knew two or three Arabs who had any genuine \
desire .to acquire knowledge for the sake of learning, irrespective of what \
it would be worth to them in cash. Perhaps this is the point of view of '
schoolboys and students in England today, but I do know that when I
was at school, and at Oxford, the thought of how much money my j j c.
education might enable me to earn never entered my head. This was not M *\

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