Prologue
HALF FULL HALF EMPTY A REPORT ON AMERICAN JEWISH EDUCATION PROLOGUE Jewish life is studded with success stories: economic success, organizational success, national success, personal success. How...
...What is it that is so wrong...
...That's what we remember...
...And the curricula, as well...
...Orthodox folk, these...
...We do not pretend that what we offer here is an exhaustive and definitive statement...
...The parents are at best ambivalent...
...So we shall simply stumble along, teaching what we surmise makes sense, a set of teachings that bears only the loosest relationship to what is done in the home, to what goes on in the community...
...The teachers...
...But the more common view is that education is a preparation for life...
...We simply haven't figured out how, or why...
...Jewish Jews...
...But the tragedy is less obvious, and warrants careful examination...
...More than nine out of ten want the Jewish community, the organized community, to increase its aid to day schools...
...Or: it is not so much the teachers or the curriculum, it is the Establishment, which provides inadequate resources for Jewish education...
...We are reluctant to give up on the effort, since the centrality of the language, as an entry to both our principal texts and to modern Israel, is manifest...
...Some arts, some crafts, some cutesy prayers, a Hebrew word or two...
...For most adults, Hebrew school is remembered as the place where they failed to learn Hebrew...
...it requires no external justification or rationale...
...Maybe, just maybe, we're beginning to want more, and better...
...Jewish parents in this country would not tolerate for twenty-four hours in their children's public schools the conditions they accept as a matter of course in their children's Jewish schools...
...on Jewish nostalgia, not on Jewish knowledge...
...we do not care especially about the texts...
...The bulk of classroom time is devoted to an effort that only rarely succeeds...
...What can they do...
...And a large infusion of capital...
...But don't make them into Jewish Jews...
...We want some Jewish education for our children, but not too much...
...Ribono shel olam, is it really all so bad...
...Where would the money come from...
...But the schools cannot be homes and neighborhoods...
...Unhappily, we lose the vast majority of our children just at the time when they are nearly ready to deal with the richness of our experience...
...There are valid arguments and valid criticisms and valid defenses, and one wants to throw up one's arms in disgust and plead a complex and senseless world, a stacked deck which will not permit us to do what we want to do, what we know ought to be done...
...We had to have some respect for it, however grudging...
...For a life of coloring books and Purim skits...
...For years and years, the dismal atmosphere and depressing results of Jewish educational institutions have been obvious to all, have been a favorite topic of complaint and a popular object of criticism...
...Which is why this month we devote these next several pages to a discussion of Jewish education today...
...Jewish and modern, Jewish and American...
...Of course the traditional view is that education is valid in itself...
...For what...
...Don't mess up their "real" education, or their ballet lessons, or their piano lessons, or their tennis lessons, or their social development...
...In secular life, it would be a grotesque embarrassment—in the kinds of company in which most of us travel—to be ignorant of Shakespeare, of Darwin, of Plato...
...But the indicters are rarely able to answer with any precision the very simple question of what it is they would spend additional resources for were such resources made available...
...Pity the schools, pity the teachers...
...But that would mean a quantum leap in federation funding...
...None...
...We want the feeling and the warmth...
...Or do they seek the Jewish equivalent of a broad, liberal arts education, an education designed to produce a "cultured," relatively literate Jew...
...It could matter...
...Many of them were utterly without pedagogic skill, but almost to a person, they were manifestly imbued with a sense of the importance of what they were doing...
...If the parents demanded, insisted on something better, in time they would get it...
...Some arts, some crafts, some cutesy prayers, a Hebrew word or two...
...We have only recently begun to provide a cadre of our own young men and women to staff our schools, and we pay these at such intolerably low wages that we cannot expect to attract the best of our young to the profession...
...We depend heavily—too heavily—on poorly trained and inadequately motivated Israelis...
...Why even some...
...Nice, even lovely, as roots, but not as branches...
...But Jewish education is an afterthought, it is something you do, like orthodontia, for cosmetic reasons, but you want to do as little of it as possible, at as low a cost as possible, and for as short a period of time as possible...
...on Jewish activity, not on Jewish knowledge...
...Medical school is what counts, no...
...God help us all...
...Then what are those things...
...Suppose we decided to double, or treble, all teachers' salaries...
...Do we really want "good" Jewish education...
...And although here or there there are surely schools that work, and students who become inspired, the informed assessment is not very far from the popular perception: something is wrong, very wrong with what we are doing...
...But don't make them into Jewish Jews...
...A little bit, but don't overstep...
...Jewish education suffers from many problems, and from one tragedy...
...Our grandparents...
...And only three percent of our respondents preferred a Sunday school education...
...If we are talking about limited expansion of the expenditure for Jewish education, (a) we have had such expansion, and it doesn't seem to have bought us very much, and (b) central funding for Jewish education (that is, from federations) is only a smallish fraction of the total educational cost, the bulk of which is borne by congregations...
...If they have too much, they will speak with Yiddish accents, they may—heaven for-fend!—become observant...
...I have recited some of them here, and anyone who has been exposed to the system could quickly add a dozen more...
...Some have even gone so far as to suggest that Hebrew and Sunday schools are the places where the seeds of antipathy to organized Jewish life are first sown...
...Who among us would want his/her own child to choose Jewish education (except at the university level) as a career...
...However we define a "good" Jewish education, it is obvious that what Dani and Sara (Jewish education's answer to Dick and Jane) did when they visited their grandparents in Tel Aviv last week is of no more consequence than what Amos had to say more than two thousand years ago, or why the Rambam deserves to be remembered...
...And until we begin to define for ourselves what kind of a life (not a "lifestyle," a life) it is we want and expect American Jews to lead, until we develop a normative statement of Jewishness that compels our attention, we shall not know what it is we want to teach...
...For what life is it that the American Jew is asked to prepare...
...Two out of three of those who chose to respond to our poll are themselves involved in some formal program of adult Jewish education, and three out of five in an informal program...
...It is too much to ask, too much to expect...
...For vicarious Israeliness...
...And our readers, at least, are somewhat optimistic...
...So goes another very popular indictment...
...Furthermore, we are locked into a system where our primary access to the young, in the pre-bar and bat mitzvah years, happens at a time when they are simply not intellectually equipped to deal with the material we want to see transmitted...
...Maybe, just maybe, a new tide is running...
...The Lower East Side...
...But we cannot, apparently, cause the effort to succeed...
...There is no Jewish life—again, except in certain quarters—in this country that depends on Jewish education...
...it is the wrong thing even to want...
...And, more important, could it possibly come without central control...
...But moment readers are special...
...It is in the effort to learn Hebrew that most young Jews experience their first Jewish failure, and the sense of it lasts and corrodes for decades to come...
...And maybe it means something —likely it does—that a bunch of people out of nowhere have created a forum for the dissemination of what they call "alternatives" in Jewish education, a forum which is more than anything else a support group for people who continue to care, who insist on caring, and who may yet turn this thing around...
...Or is that really so...
...How shabby the contrast between all these and our educational effort...
...And so on and so forth...
...If so, then hardly of the conventional kind...
...We want the schools to do it all, to replace the home, to replace the neighborhood, to provide the context, the fabric, the texture for a Jewish life that was once organic and is now studied, added on, amended to our "regular" life...
...Don't make such a big thing of it...
...nothing and no one is exempt...
...The problems are obvious...
...The odds that it will matter increase, of course, as we whose children are the consumers begin to insist on meaning, on content, on standards, on richness, begin to care, really care...
...Maybe it really means something that day schools continue to grow, and maybe it means something that adults continue to learn, and maybe it means something that the same kids who got a shoddy introduction in Hebrew school now major in Jewish studies in college...
...Last December, we asked our readers in one of moment's periodic surveys to share their notions about Jewish education with us...
...Now...
...We lack a vision of how we can be both Jewish and human...
...Do they seek an instrumental learning, one which will permit the learner to do certain things he would not have been able to do had he remained ignorant...
...Maybe...
...A ten percent increase in federation expenditures for education would mean a net growth of approximately two percent in the total educational budget...
...The central issue here is the Hebrew language...
...Some say the teachers, others the curricula, others the parents...
...So the teachers are to blame...
...Where we have that vision, it depends on Jewish loyalty, not on Jewish knowledge...
...Because, dammit, we do care, we do want, it does matter...
...Those of us over the age of forty were educated, in the main, by immigrants...
...At best, they can be schools...
...For the single most damaging indictment remains this: people get about what they deserve, about what they want...
...The tragedy is that, for the most part, Jewish parents haven't the foggiest idea what it is they want their children to get out of Jewish schools...
...It is, instead, intended as a stimulus to conversation, to thought, and then, of course, to action.—L.F...
...Less than a third support federal aid to parochial (i.e., day) schools...
...Given the conventional pessimism of the Jewish community, those are astonishing statistics...
...And if we failed, if we bridled, if we were bored, resentful, whatever, we still knew that there was something there that mattered...
...But in what Jewish circles, except the most esoteric, is ignorance of Bia-lik, of Agnon, of Buber, of Isaiah, of almost anything, a problem...
...More important, fully 71 percent tell us that they would choose a day school education for their own children were they making the choice today...
...They cared, and often desperately, for us, their offspring...
...We keep spending large sums of money to beef up and jazz up a basic set of materials, and there is no good evidence that any of these efforts provides nearly the improvement it promises...
...They cannot, they could not...
...Depending on the critic, almost every aspect of the effort is to blame...
...Some Jewish education, therefore, but not too much...
...They took themselves, and their texts, and us, with absolute seriousness...
...And would such control really improve the product...
...Not quite...
...Three out of five of those who responded believe that the quality of Jewish education has improved of late, and about the same number believe that it will be better in the 80's than it was in the 60's...
...They could not be more even if all the teachers were Henry Higgins and all the curricula were alchemy and all the languages were Esperanto...
...Not knowing what, we cannot know how...
...Nor is that figure skewed by elderly respondents now offering "cheap" answers...
...Three out of four of our respondents under the age of 35 express a preference for day schools...
Vol. 3 • October 1978 • No. 10
