Hebrew School Daze

Dear Friends:

I strongly concur with Emily Goldsher's analysis. 

 Several years ago, I sat on a Jewish outreach listserve where this topic was discussed. Most of the Jewish educators who participated taught in Hebrew schools and Sunday schools, though there were also day school educators as well.

 They were an exceptionally intelligent and engaging group.

 I pointed out that most Christians don't send their children to day schools -- while there are Christian day schools, they are costly, and many Christians cannot afford them.

 But their Sunday schools and their weeday and weekend youth groups, often only an hour or two a week of the children's and teenagers' time, are remarkably effective.

 The Christians get maximum "bang for the buck" from their Sunday schools and youth programs, often taught by volunteers. Their Sunday schools and youth programs often provide short, colorful, interesting, compelling instruction, that translates to strong adult Christian identities. 

 Children are provided with Bibles, coloring books, and other materials that draw them in. Children and teens are also encouraged to invite other neighborhood children to the Sunday "children's services" and Sunday school instruction, modeling Christian outreach behavior at an early age.

 Christians also have excellent home schooling programs.

 As the adult child of a Jewish-Christian intermarriage, who was raised Christian, and now lives as a Jew, I have always been amazed by the expense of Jewish education and the lack of compelling materials, based on the stories I have heard from friends with two Jewish parents, and my personal examination of these materials in Jewish bookstores.

 Many non-Orthodox Jews complained to me that their Jewish instruction as children and teens consisted of tedious memorization of the Hebrew alphabet -- but not acquiring any fluency in Hebrew -- watching Holocaust films that terrified them (message: "be Jewish and some day you'll be dead, too") -- and being heavily propagandized for Israel (message: "come to this beautiful, exotic, ancestral country. Kill the current Arab inhabitants or maybe they will kill you.").

 Not surprisingly, some of my Jewish acquaintances no longer really practice Judaism.

 I told the Jewish educators on the listserve that we might be better off abandoning the crushingly expensive Jewish day school model, and the "boring" (one of the nicer adjectives used by my Jewish friends) several-days-a-week Hebrew schools, in favor of really intense, compelling, one or two hour children's instruction on Shabbat.

 Now, not surprisingly, my suggestions were poorly received. I was, in their view, suggesting that they give up their livelihoods and also adopt an alien Christian model of education.

 Many said that they had never examined the Christian model, because they had never been in a church. I assured them that most local Christian churches would be only too happy to share their educational models with curious Jewish educators.

 They also stated that major improvements in children's and teen's programming have taken place over the last twenty years.

I pointed out that if more compelling programming for Jewish children and teens was successful, teachers would still be needed. They did not agree. They said if the Christian model was adopted, and even volunteers could teach, they would all lose their jobs.

I doubted this.

 The educators also said that the Christians have it easier, because the U.S. is a majority Christian society, and they can teach in English -- no Hebrew required. I pointed that the U.S. now has a number of religions and secular cultures competing with Christianty, and that until recently, the majority of the Catholics had Latin masses, and much of their instructional material contained Latin. 

 Until 1976, the Episcopalian prayerbook was in 16th century English, with a lot of Latin and Greek as well. So I pointed out to the educators that other religious groups faced with the same problem as Judaism -- complex prayerbooks and religious and cultural materials with big sections written in foreign languages -- had chosen to put most of their current materials in modern English, because congregants were severely stressed by Shakespearean English, Latin and Greek.

 I suggested that we have less Hebrew, and focus on getting that Hebrew better taught and more clearly understood. I suggested that our priority should be transmission of Jewish ideas, whether they were in Hebrew or not.

 My ideas seemed very alien to this group of educators, but I think Emily's article points out the need for out-of-the-box thinking on this issue.

 Cordially,

Robin Margolis

www.half-jewish.net

 

 

For some examples of "out-of-the-box" thinking in Jewish day schools and Jewish education in general, I suggest you take a look at how it's done in smaller cities that are far away from Jewish cultural and religious centers. When you're living Jewishly in the "hinterlands" you tend to have a greater imperative to create as you go, and to worry less about what The Folks In New York will think of you as a result.

You also have more room for cross-branch communication; in Portland Oregon, the two Jewish day schools both offer an excellent education to grades K-8 (there is no Jewish day high school in Portland because the Jewish population isn't large enough to support one). The larger and older of the two schools (Portland Jewish Academy) provides an outstanding secular curriculum along with broadly-based Jewish historic, religious and cultural instruction and was recently certified as an International Baccalaureate School. The cafeteria serves fully-Kosher meals and children from throughout the spectrum of Portland's Jewish community attend classes together. Some limited scholarship help is available to families who qualify financially and many families who don't live near PJA organize carpools from all over the Portland area. It isn't easy to give your child a Jewish day-school education here but it can be done.

Synagogue supplemental programs in Portland, which generally meet once a week, are diverse and innovative as well. There is a great deal of cooperation between students from several of the larger synagogues, who collaborate on service projects and activities several times throughout the school year.

One major challenge in smaller Jewish communities is finding -- or growing -- qualified teachers for both day-school and synagogue programs. I think this has t do with both the high cost of training professional Jewish educators AND the relatively low pay that most Jewish teachers earn. I worked in a synsgogue supplemental school for nearly ten years, and for a time envisioned becoming a Jewish educator. But when grad school tuition cost over twenty grand a year and my average annual salary at the synagogue school was less than a third of that, I realized it made no sense to try and make Jewish education a full-time career unless I was willing to relocate to a very large Jewish center like NewYork or Los Angeles. That's something I'm simply not willing to do, so I'm done with Jewish education and have gone back to my previous career with very few regrets.

Jewish education doesn't have to be boring or irrelevant, but it does need to be flexible in order to be innovative.

 

I agree with Emily: Jewish day schools are often overlooked as the grounds for staging education reforms. Although I attended a very liberal day school in my early education, the institution was still plagued by its inadequacies to overcome a very limited curriculum, unqualified teachers (there is a supposition that being from Israel automatically qualifies one to teach in a Jewish school), as well as fiscal problems. Before we solve the crisis of budget gaps in day schools, perhaps we should first address the question of why we need these places to begin with.