Why the Maronite Church Refuses to Teach Aramaic in its Schools

"Why don't you teach your Maronite 'flock' its native language, Aramaic?" I once asked a wizard of the Maronite church, and his answer was:

"We teach Maronite children Arabic so they can get jobs among the Muslim Arabs of the Arabian Gulf.

We teach Maronite children French so they emigrate and get jobs in Europe and send money back home, but also out of nostalgia for the defunct "mother" that France once was.

And recently we started teaching English so the children get jobs in the Americas (US, Canada, Australia, etc.) and around the world.

You see, we need our children to leave this backward and unproductive country to make money abroad and send it here so we enrich the church even more, so we can be more backward and primitive by demolishing our historic centuries-old churches and replace them with newer cool-looking soulless churches, and erect more statues of all those saints we produce and keep sending to the Vatican.

Teaching our children Aramaic, a dead and useless language, would be a waste of time, though we still use it in our church rituals like a relic of the past.  In fact, we don't want to teach Aramaic because it might resurrect a Lebanese nationalism tied to our Phoenician pagan past. Aramaic was the language of the Phoenicians, those pagans whose civilization we, the church, destroyed with sheer violence and repression to impose the dictatorship of the new religion, Christianity. We demolished their temples and their statues and we replaced them with churches and other statues, and we persecuted those who rejected Christ."

The Maronite Church's educational strategy does NOT include teaching the children about their national non-sectarian identity. The Church indoctrinates the children about being subservient to the Church and about a self-inflated sense of superiority over other Lebanese. But most fundamentally, the Church fears that fostering a broader national identity, founded in Lebanon's Phoenician history and separate from its narrow sectarian inward-looking identity, will make the Church lose its tight grip over the Christian community and consequently over all its money-making enterprises that are themselves substitutes for the real thing. A strong civilian state that shuns religion is not to the advantage of the Maronite Church Corporation. There is no such thing as accountability with religious institutions: They are protected by their "sacred" aura and have managed in many countries around the world to claim a "non-profit" status with which they reap enormous profits to the disadvantage of the public sector.

Religious schools in Lebanon actively combat public schools; I repeat "actively". In some areas that I am familiar with, public schools have been literally shut down by the local Maronite political boss to force people to send their children to the religious schools. Most of these children come from peasant families with moderate incomes. With the deteriorating economy, these families have become poorer and can no longer afford the tuition and costs of religious schools, and are migrating en masse to the maligned and weakened public schools. The reaction of the Maronite Church Mafia: Demand that the state pay the Church directly to offset its impending losses. The more rational, patriotic and ethical thing to do would be to use the money to fix, habilitate and empower the public schools.

The same dynamic applies to universities in Lebanon. Public universities are destitute, underfunded, with politically-appointed administrations that keep fighting with their own faculty and students, while private religious universities - each beholden to a religious sect - thrive.

The Lebanese have by now invented an educational-economic system that goes like this:

- Train - but do not educate - students just enough for them to get jobs, a system I call Mercantile Education (Education Marchande): ignore such skills as research, culture, general knowledge, real science, skepticism-based and question-raising learning for the sake of learning.

- Maintain the general population intellectually imprisoned inside dogmatic sectarian concentration camps, in order to maintain people in a state of fear of the other sects, thus reinforcing the claim by the Church of "protecting" its people, which in turn makes people send their children to religious schools. 

- With the constant state of sectarian instability and war in Lebanon and the poor economic conditions, these "educated" children are then encouraged by their families and the Church to emigrate to find the jobs for which they were trained. 

- Once expatriated, the children rarely return, thus depleting the country of its active forces. But that is just fine for the religious neanderthals, because these expatriate children start making money and sending it back to their families who, in turn, are so grateful for the Church to have educated their children for making money overseas. Many of these expatriated children later return to give money to the Church, to build yet another church or a statue of one saint or another, and eventually bequeath land to the Church.

Some will argue that Lebanon is small and cannot accommodate all of its people's needs. But think of Hong Kong, Singapore, Luxemburg, etc. - and even Israel - they are all small nations but with flourishing economies that meet all their people's needs. 

Why is Lebanon unable to emulate these other small nations? Because of inborn arrogance: The Lebanese do not want jobs that have no titles associated with them like doctor, engineer, esquire, manager, etc.. There is no social prestige associated with being a plumber or electrician or computer technician.... Unlike, say in Germany, where only a minority of children finishes high school with a secondary education degree. Most young people are deviated from traditional, and today obsolete, educational paths and are trained to be excellent technicians in a variety of fields that the country needs. In Lebanon, everyone wants to graduate with the Baccalaureat and go to university, but the system is constantly lagging behind developments in the West by a couple of decades, such that when these developments finally arrive to the country, they have often become obsolete and replaced by newer developments. That is the problem with countries that "import" their modes of thinking and operating because it is a lot easier and "cool" to monkey the West, instead of developing their own plans and methods based on their needs. To do the latter requires hard work, thinking, and attention to detail, among other things, which the "cool" Lebanese have no time for, preferring to sit in cafes, smoke the arguileh, eat like whales, and as they often repeat like idiots, "love life".

How can Lebanon overcome this vicious cycle? By instituting its own mechanisms to study its own problems and needs, and come up with its own solutions. By creating these internal domestic sources of knoewledge, ideas and plans, not only will Lebanon find its own adapted solutions but it will also cease to be like a dog on a leash to developments in the West. We need to stop believing that everything western is great, that we can lazy up year round until the Americans send us their latest fad so we imitate it, copy it, monkey it... always out of context, which ensures its failure.

The Maronite Church refuses to teach one of the few cultural memes that can bind Lebanese society together into one national identity: the Aramaic language, our pre-Christian, pre-Muslim language, the foundation of our identity as Phoenicians, which both religions have strived to kill and eliminate. In this case, I call on the Lebanese to imitate the Irish: They became Christians and Catholics but maintained their Celtic identity intact. They adopted English, the language of their oppressors, but they teach and use their Celtic language in everyday life, on road signs, business signs, in the names they give to their children, etc. They became a western country but maintain their specific Celtic traditions. They have dignity. They have courage. They have values and principles. The show-off, the economic and the mercantile are second place. 

Aramaic Lebanon, or Phoenicia, laid the ground for all Mediterranean cultures that followed them, yet the idiot Lebanese prefer to use the westernized versions of names they themselves developed because it is not "cool" to use older names. One shining example is the name of a Maronite Saint by the Aramaic name of Rafqa, which evolved into Hebrew Rivka and European Rebecca. The birthplace of that saint is in the village of Himlaya, near Bickfaya in the Metn District. The people of Himlaya are very devout Maronites, but they invariably name their daughters Rebecca, not Rafqa, in the stupid belief that Rafqa is archaic or Arabic-sounding, while Rebecaa is cooler and western-sounding like some Hollywood actress.

Maybe Greater Lebanon can be saved by binding its people to their Phoenician identity that predates the Christian (350 AD) and Muslim (630 AD) invasions.