3 min read
ByRabbi Neil Janes, Rabbi Neil Janes
I want to change the conversation we seem to be having about education in the Jewish community . We need to start by recognising that the structures we have put in place are dysfunctional and generally insufficiently embedded in the home and total community experience. They make no demands of us across generations and offer no space for us to think about the important questions of the how and why of being Jewish.
Some of the structures, like Jewish schools, are making us insular in ways we never could have predicted. Other parts, like cheder, are inadequate but receive an inordinate amount of resources without demands for success. Yet other parts of our education infrastructure, the youth movements, which used to be the jewel in the crown of the Jewish community, are, from what I have heard, slowly disappearing as radical counter-cultural projects.
Let me start with the youth movements. They do, in theory, offer a counter-cultural life. And their point is to be disconnected from the home in that rebellious and creative way. They force us as to think differently.
But summer camp and Israel tour is now so expensive that I could never afford both. And youth movements struggle to be counter-cultural in the face of new pressures of the 21st century. Add to that the tragedy that we don't send people on a year's programme to Israel in sufficient numbers. I am a passionate supporter of the youth movement - they frequently nurture the missing values and feelings and create the relationships absent from other places.
So we move to our supplementary schools, our cheders. Unlike youth movements, in the past 20-30 years they have never been held to account. These days, they might be fun and offer chances to make friends, even train our children to perform at bat- and barmitzvah. But there's surely a better way of using the massive financial investment than sitting our children in synagogues for 30 weeks a year for a couple of hours or trying to teach them a modern and ancient foreign language in 45 minutes a week.
Supplementary schools have never worked out how to build links back to the home, because the system is effectively unchanged since the model made sense decades ago.
Finally, Jewish schools threaten to undermine meaningful productive Jewish educational programming and seem to be failing at Jewish identity development. From what I can tell, the system now means that we are using the Jewish day school experience for the same reason that cheder was historically used for - delegating responsibility for Jewish experiences and inoculating children in the same way we were ''inoculated'' for our lives. The system fails to recognise the reality that the school will have little impact individually, while it continues to ignore the bridge building necessary to the home and synagogue.
How well-behaved is your child's school?
The home is the key to Jewish identity and life-long engagement and Jewish learning. But parents are now even less engaged by the system. If you're already Jewishly involved (whatever that means for you), you are probably thrilled by the day-school experience and the opportunities it offers to live in the rhythms of the Jewish year, to have your Shabbat reinforced by the school week. But, if not, then the day-school message from the Jewish community is that ''we'll do it'' forgetting that they can't. Judaism in this paradigm occurs in a vacuum.
The wonderful teachers in our schools have no chance because the system is constructed to fail. The system is not the integrated community life we need. If we really want to succeed in transmitting a meaningful Judaism to the next generation it has to start at home.
Our synagogues and schools have to be given the opportunity to think about what that means, while our youth movements should push back in gentle (and not so gentle) acts of rebellion. Everything has to build bridges to the home and the worlds must be interconnected. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding him- or herself. Day school is not enough. We need to put in place new systems and new spaces to think creatively.
That's why the institute for adult Jewish education that I'm setting up, The Lyons Institute, will challenge us to think as adults (and not only parents). We will deepen our adult conversations, not just with those already engaged but with all of us.
