July 10th, '03
School for Scandal

Like many people here in Israel, I have grown so accustomed to brutally bad news that my sense of outrage is dulled on most days. And when I feel overwhelmed by my personal responsibilities, my concern for national issues disappears altogether.

Still, here's something we should all be paying more attention to: the sorry state of Israeli education.

Back in the early '50s, when Israel was absorbing hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from post-war Europe and from Arab lands, our educational infrastructure was minimal. But Israelis consistently scored among the highest in the world in math.

Now, despite the country's relative prosperity (if you overlook the current deep recession), Israel's scores in math - as well as reading comprehension - are taking a nose dive. In short, Israel is allowing its educational system to sink to Third World levels. And nobody has the time or energy to care.

Take a look at this recent article from the Jerusalem Post's Yosef Goell. It serves as an important reminder that while Israel is being forced to muster enormous resources just to survive day to day, it ignores the future at its own peril.

The value of shame, By Yosef Goell

How can an entire nation radically change course to prevent imminent disaster if so many of its people and leaders refuse even to admit the existence of a peril? I refer, of course, to the crisis in education, which I wrote about in this column last week.

New data aired during the past week reveal a situation even worse than previously reported. This new information, contained in a comparative international study of 15-year old middle-school pupils, confirms earlier studies that ranked Israeli pupils at the bottom third of industrialized countries in literacy, math and science.

Our rankings are light years away from such East Asian powerhouses as Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea, and even from most English-speaking and West European countries. The countries we are lumped in with are Greece, Latvia, Bulgaria, Albania, Macedonia, Mexico and Brazil.

The real shocker, however, is that only two or three decades ago, at a time when Israel was much poorer and devoted a much higher proportion of its national income to defense, our schoolchildren were consistently ranked close to the top of the list.

There is no indication that our children's natural intelligence falls significantly below that of other countries; or, for that matter, that our teachers are worse. Obviously something is very wrong with our educational system.

Particularly worrisome was the knee-jerk reaction of Minister of Education Limor Livnat, who blamed previous governments and ministry administrations for the cumulative neglect and defects. Her plan? To appoint several committees to propose reforms.

Livnat was honest enough to admit, however, that during her tenure the education budget had been cut 11 times. Systems, including curricula, organizational charts, teachers requirements and the like, can be changed. That is not what a minister of education is for. What ministers are for is to fight for budgets, and when their prime minister, finance minister and cabinet colleagues consistently short-change them, to bring the fight to the public by threatening to resign and bring down the government.

Livnat did none of these, ultimately acceding to all the budget cuts.

IN MY column last week I concentrated on the problem of teachers' low pay. Not everything can be fixed with more money, but major problems like average class size can be solved only by substantially higher budgets.

Interestingly, in describing her goals, Livnat told the Caesarea economic conference: "I'm not looking for reform, but for revolution."

If that is so, she should set up an inquiry commission comprising educational leaders from Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea to recommend what we should do to emulate the achievements of their youngsters. But for the government, minister of education and educational establishment of the Jewish state, whose people have traditionally prided themselves on how smart they are "compared to the goyim," that would require a preliminary and profound sense of shame over what has been happening.

So how does one begin to turn things around? My suggestion is by first engendering such a cathartic sense of shame over how un-Jewishly dumb we have permitted ourselves to become. A widespread sense of collective shame could have a mobilizing effect.

In the mid-1970s I visited Japan as a guest of its Foreign Ministry. One of the things I was interested in learning was how they had succeeded in turning Tokyo so quickly from one of the most polluted cities in the world to one of the cleanest. The official in charge of the environment told me the major motivational factor had been the deep sense of shame felt by the Japanese people and political establishment over their capital being depicted throughout the world as so polluted.

We need to mobilize such a sense of shame because the problem extends far beyond the educational system. It has to do with how we as a people view the importance of quality education and leaning the joy of learning which used to be a major Jewish trait.

And if there is anyone before whom we should be most ashamed, it is the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora, who still maintain that basic Jewish approach to learning.

One of the seemingly contradictory figures to emerge from the recent coverage is Israel's being one of the leading countries in per-capita expenditure on education. But much of that money is not from the government. It is from what Israelis call "grey education" remedial and enrichment classes as well as private lessons.

Affluent parents can supplement their children's education while others cannot. This reflects the income gaps that have emerged over the past two decades.

These gaps go a long way in explaining why the differences between our stronger and weaker pupils are among the highest in the world.

The original article can be found at the Jerusalem Post website.

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