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I began my schooling in 1933 in Alexandretta, Syria. The school was run by missionaries from the United Kingdom. When I started kindergarten, instruction was in Arabic and English. In higher grades, English became the main language, though Arabic grammar, syntax, and literature remained part of the curriculum. Beginning in the nineteenth century, education became the primary missionary method among Protestants and Catholics alike.

American Protestants founded the Syrian Protestant College in 1866, choosing a beautiful part of Beirut for the campus, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. The college played a crucial role in the development of the Protestant community in the Middle East.

After the First World War, it became the American University of Beirut (AUB) under a Board of Governors based in New York State. The institution fostered cultural exchange and intellectual growth among diverse communities and contributed significantly to modernization and reform movements in the Arab world.

The major Christian communion in Lebanon is the Maronite Church, which first affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church in the late Middle Ages. In 1875, the Jesuits founded Saint Joseph University in Beirut to promote French academic excellence in competition with the AUB.

The AUB and Saint Joseph University were not the only foreign educational institutions to enter the field of Missions.

A major French Catholic educational organization was the “Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools,” known as La Salle. Its headquarters were in Alexandria, Egypt, and Beirut, Lebanon. Education as a missionary method spread throughout the Middle East and became a model in several parts of Asia and Africa, where European colonialism had been established.

Early in the twentieth century, certain Western missionaries questioned the value of educational institutions in missions, rather than Evangelism by the Church. The critique was grounded in the Bible and in the paucity of converts from the schools.

Roland Allen, a British Anglican missionary, advocated planting churches that would be self-supporting, self-propagating, and self-governing. In his book The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church and the Causes That Hinder It, he wrote:

“This then is what I mean by spontaneous expansion. I mean the expansion which follows the unexhorted and unorganized activity of individual members of the Church explaining to others the Gospel which they have found for themselves; I mean the expansion which follows the irresistible attraction of the Christian Church for men who see its ordered life, and are drawn to it by desire to discover the secret of a life which they instinctively desire to share. It’s the spontaneous expansion of the Church involved not merely the multiplication of Christians but the multiplication of churches.

“I delight to think that a Christian traveling on his business, or fleeing from persecution, could preach Christ, and a Church spring up as the result of his preaching... The spontaneous expansion of the Church reduced to its elements is a quite simple thing. It asks for no elaborate organization, no large finances, no vast number of paid missionaries…. The organization of a little church on the apostolic model is also extremely simple …There is no need at the beginning to talk of preparing leaders to face great national issues.”

The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church: and the Causes Which Hinder it on JSTOR.

Roland Allen wrote a booklet on education, Education in the Native Church. It offered a thorough critique of using mission schools to convert non-Christian children. Among his insights are the following statements in Chapter 3:

“Christian education is far more the education of Christians than education given by Christians ... teaching received by a non-Christian from a Christian is non-Christian in the non-Christian mind…. Therefore, non-Christians cannot receive Christian education in a Christian school even if they are compulsorily taught much Christian doctrine and Gospel history.”

I would like to analyze his thesis, both biblically and historically. “Teaching received by a non-Christian from a Christian is non-Christian in the non-Christian mind.”

The Christian faith touches a person to the core and is unlike the acquisition of knowledge in history or mathematics. It is the acquisition of a new mind. As Paul put it in II Corinthians 5:17, "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” (or a new mind). A believer is transformed into a new person; his worldview becomes Pauline. The same lesson was taught by the Lord Jesus Christ in his encounter with Nicodemus: “…no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again,” John 3:3.

As mentioned above, my early education took place at a Protestant mission school. The school enrolled Christian students (Protestant and Orthodox) and Muslims.

Ataturk’s success in acquiring our Province (Hatay) in 1939 forced most of its Arabic-speaking residents to move to other parts of Syria and to Beirut, Lebanon. I enrolled at College Saint Joseph of the “Brothers of Christian Schools.” What a relief to have the metric system in place of the archaic British imperial system of weights and measures! However, Christian students from non-Catholic backgrounds were required to attend Mass, study the Catechism, and participate in special seasons, such as the May devotions, a month dedicated to Mary!

From 1940 to 1945, studying and living in a Catholic milieu didn’t succeed in converting me to Catholicism. Neither did any Orthodox students exchange their faith. Their minds remained firmly anchored in Orthodoxy.

Mission schools of all types ended after independence. Syria experienced several coups d’état, some quite violent, until Hafez al-Assad’s coup in 1970, which turned Syria into a dictatorship until late 2024.