Education Israel style

The headlines made it nearly impossible for me to pass the opportunity to address my feelings about the school system in Israel. “Netanyahu, officials launch highly anticipated education system reform.” Wow! You’d think they adopted New Math, but whatever you might have thought, you would probably be mistaken. Here’s the tag line; “New program, coming after years of deliberations, would see teachers' pay increase by 51% in exchange for additional working hours.” And the worst part, it’s a bad deal for teachers. They increase their work hours from 24 to 40 per week, 16 hours or 66%, and they only get compensated for 51%. The net effect is a lower hourly wage. But this change doesn’t even get close to deserving the word reform.

There is a lot to fear when reform is used in education in general, and in Israel specifically. I’m not referring to the difference between revolution and reform, between which Israel needs the former. I am talking about the long history of educational reforms that Israel suffers from because of the unfortunate tie of the ministry of education to the political system. These reforms make our kids schizophrenic. For example, under Yuli Tamir, the students learned about the Green Line and Naqba Day. Now, under the Likud’s Gidon Saar, the state of Israel and the land of Israel are virtually synonyms, saying Naqba is punishable by law and schools will be doing field trips to Hebron. But this is not the subject of this tome.

The revolution I call for is directed at high schools and matriculations. I firmly believe that the existing system of training kids in grades 10-12, to remember materials and take tests, is at the core of many of Israel’s problems. We cannot have a dynamic society of individuals who know how to creatively solve problems and imagine the kind of country they want to live in if we feed them answers and ask them to regurgitate them in tests. Maybe this is what the country needed 63 years ago when we had to draft as many resources as possible to the cause of defending the homeland, but today the challenges are different and the anachronistic approaches are doing much more harm than good.

I believe that personal anecdotes help vivify important social questions. Here are a few. I taught Israeli high school civics and Bible. I did things like ask my students to try to understand the Israeli Declaration of Independence via comparison to the American Declaration. I thought it would be helpful for them to see that Israel leaves out God and democracy while America includes both. In Bible, my class of all immigrant students wrote about their immigration in comparison to Abraham’s calling to “Leave your country, and your homeland, and your father's house, and go to the land that I will show you.” My principal responded by telling me that I was too philosophical and creative. She handed me the matriculation tests and the answers and told me that, “this is all that matters.”

My daughter Maya recently saw her Solomon Schechter eighth grade teachers who were here on a day school trip with their students from Chicago. Her English teacher asked if she was still doing the great writing she had done in middle school. Maya told me that the question made her upset because it reminded her that she is never asked to be creative. “They ask me to write answers to questions in a very narrow way that gives their understandings. They don’t care what I think, only what I know.”

The irony of the situation is that the Jewish state has primary Jewish sources that complicate the idea of what education should look like, and we don’t look to them. In Pirkei Avot, Moses receives the Torah and passes it to the elders who pass it forward as if education is concrete and reified. This is the Education ministry model. But we also have the story of Moses sitting in Rabbi Akiva’s classroom dumbfounded because he doesn’t understand his own Torah. In this model, knowledge is made by the individual through engagement with ideas. It is not something that can be remembered and repeated for standardized tests. Moses doesn’t recognize his Torah because it is not the a solid, unchanging thing. Knowledge making is a skill of the individual and it is fluid. In our Talmud, both of these ideas exist side by side, but in the Israeli education system, we only want to pass a tangible, specific Torah, and it changes with every government.

The other Jewish example is also found in Pirkei Avot. We read of Yochanan ben Zakai’s five students. I will recount two. “Rabbi Eliezer the son of Hurkenus is a cemented cistern that loses not a drop; Rabbi Elazar ben Arach is as an ever-increasing wellspring. [Rabbi Yochanan] used to say: If all the sages of Israel were to be in one cup of a balance-scale, and Eliezer the son of Hurkenus were in the other, he would outweigh them all. Abba Shaul said in his name: If all the sages of Israel were to be in one cup of a balance-scale, Eliezer the son of Hurkenus included, and Elazar the son of Arach were in the other, he would outweigh them all.” The Talmud never decides for us what is better to be a vessel of knowledge or to produce a vital necessity. It leaves us with two models that contradict each other. Both have their time and place. Why in Israel do we have to stick with just one?
****
My daughter is in the middle of her high school experience and I feel like I am doing her wrong by not choosing the best education system I can find for her. Nothing is perfect, but I think America is better, at least my America. I hate having to face this choice, but those are my cards. Now the question is whether to stay and fight to improve things while my daughter finishes school here or move to where I can do the best for my kids. It seems like a simple choice, but not when you live in a wonderful city like Tel Aviv. Right now I’m feeling the old Yiddish saying, it’s hard to be a Jew, but I’m feeling it about Israel.