JustASC

My most recent column is about a new report from the Avi Chai Foundation on the future of Hebrew school (supplementary schools, Sunday schools, heder — call them what you will):

Bad Hebrew school experiences not only shaped the Jewish worldview of alienated baby boomers, but helped establish the priorities of our most active, most highly identified Jews. I have a hunch that the rise of the day school movement in the past 20 years is owed in no small part to Jewish professionals and philanthropists who, drawing on their own childhood trauma, felt the supplementary school model was unsalvageable. The best minds, and the big bucks, went into the day schools, attracting, in turn, parents with grim Hebrew school memories of their own.

And yet, the majority of children receiving a Jewish education in this country are enrolled in supplementary schools. That’s 230,000 kids at some 2,000 part-time schools.

The thrust of my piece, like the report it refers to, was to explore those who are getting part-time Jewish education right and to encourage community planners and philanthropists to invest more intellectual energy and capital in creating “schools that work.”

And many, probably most, readers took it that way. The Reform movement sent it out to subscribers of their daily “Ten Minutes of Torah.”   At the InterfaithFamily.com blog, Micah Sachs gets my point:

At least for myself, I had to get rid of the bitter taste of Hebrew school before I was comfortable engaging with Judaism again in my early 20s. For generations of Jewish-American children, Hebrew school has provided a place to goof off far away from the all-knowing antenna of public school’s fearsome PERMANENT RECORD.

And I got a nice note from Jeffrey Lasday, the newly appointed director of education at PELIE, a national clearinghouse promoting excellence in supplementary school education:

With the large majority of children receiving a Jewish education still enrolled in Hebrew and/or Sunday school settings, we appreciate you keeping this issue in the forefront.

Still, some readers thought I was harsh on Hebrew schools. One local reader — a Hebrew school director — wrote that my column:

portrays the stereotype of religious school in the dark ages – and perpetuates the myth of hating religious school. …Jewish education has changed dramatically in [thelast thirty years]. What you read about in the report is nothing more and maybe less than you would observe in our congregational schools in MetroWest. We have long ago begun to integrate formal and informal education, taken the textbook learning and made it interactive.

Anyway, while my memories and Micah’s are pretty typical, it is, as I indicated in my piece, heartening that some schools are doing a much better job than the ones we went to.  I’m not sure what the harm is in alerting readers to the idea that schools can be better if we only take them seriously, and that there is a report out there suggesting how.

(There is another interesting take on the report here.)

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 6:30 pm and is filed under JustASC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.