Thursday, February 17, 2011

Education in Israel

On Tuesday afternoon we went to a lecture given as part of the series sponsored by AACI Netanya at Netanya Academic College Judaic Studies Program. The idea of this series is to provide lectures in English on serious and interesting subjects using the academic personnel at Netanya College. This lecture was on "Challenges of national education" by former Ambassador Yitzhak Mayer, who was Israeli Ambassador to Brussels, Belgium and Berne, Switzerland, as well as having many other roles, including Director of the Yemin Orde Youth Village from 1961-79 and World Chairman of the education department of the Jewish Agency from 1982-91.

Amb. Mayer expressed the opinion that education is more important than mere physical survival for Israel. Without a raison d'etre a State such as Israel cannot continue to exist. He spoke of the fragmentation of Israeli society that manifested itself right from the beginning of the State. Originally Zionists were a very small minority among Jews, and Zionism was opposed by the majority of religious Jews. When the State was founded in 1948 it was necessary to establish a primary educational system that took into account all the Jewish streams, some of them mutually antagonistic. In order to overcome this fragmentation, some Zionists including Rabbi Meir Berlin of the Mizrahi movement proposed only "one stream", but as a matter of practical policy there had to be several. The influential kibbutz movement insisted that they have a stream that was not influenced by the Orthodox. David Ben Gurion decided on three streams, the secular (hiloni), religious (National Religious) and ultra-Orthodox (haredi). In 1960 the relative sizes of these three streams was secular 67%, religious 27% and haredi 7%. However today these percentages have changed drastically to secular 58%; religious 19% and haredi 28%. So there is a move towards the ultra-Orthodox by virtue of their large family size.

One of the greatest achievements of Zionism was the revival of the Hebrew language. At first, it was envisaged that all schools would be taught in Hebrew, but now schools are also taught in Yiddish (for the haredi) and Arabic for the 20% Arab minority. But, because of the large Arab families their children represent 28% of the 900,000 or so primary age children. Also, not originally envisaged was the development of non-State private schools. For example, today there are 600 private schools run by the Islamic movement in Israel that are not subject to Ministry of Education inspection! Yet, they still receive 50% of the cost of education paid to full State (Liba) schools, and there are many other private schools that are registered that receive 75% of their financial support. The whole system is therefore greatly fragmented, with the degree of solidarity in terms of Hebrew and knowledge of Israeli history being gradually diluted. This fragmentation is political, religious and economic, wealthy citizens avoiding public schooling for their children. The question is, how far can this go, when today there are ca. 50% of the youth population avoiding military service in the IDF.

The question of "who is a Jew?" is relevant to this discussion, since many Jews are educated outside Israel, where the emphasis is quite different. If a Reform Jews comes to Israel without being able to speak Hebrew and claims to be a Jew, to what extent can he/she be expected to fit into Israeli society. Ultimately it is the solidarity of the people that make the State and there can't be solidarity without a common basis in education.

In answering questions, Amb. Mayer accepted that there is a kind of malaise throughout the Western world, where in the USA and the UK there is a turn away from high standards in schooling and increased permissiveness and violence. He agreed, but pointed out that those other countries don't have enemies poised on their borders. In Israel solidarity counts for much more. He also agreed with another questioner that the booming Israeli economy and high tech sector contradicts the pessimism related to the primary school system. He quoted, "a pessimist is sure that what the optimist is afraid of is going to happen."

Amb. Mayer did not propose solutions to the problems he identified, but agreed that the pay of teachers, the standard of teaching, improved parenting, electoral reform and greater national concern could all have positive effects on these problems if they were addressed. Altogether a very interesting presentation by a natural lecturer.

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