Section archive - Formal Education

A new subject, 'Jewish Culture and Heritage,' will be become part of the compulsory curriculum in the upcoming school year in Israel. Some 900 teachers will be trained to teach the subject in the fifth to eighth grades following a successful trial. The new subject was initiated by Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar with the aim of strengthening the Jewish, Zionist and democratic values among students, as part of the objectives he declared upon taking office. The Education Ministry has begun to train special teachers for the program who will receive a diploma expanding their teaching license upon the completion of their training.

JWeekly.com reports about a nondenominational Jewish high school offering self-paced individual learning and low-cost tuition, The Pre-Collegiate Learning Center, which is expected to open in central New Jersey in September, 2011. The school has been bolstered by a $50,000 grant from the Avi Chai Foundation. Its projected tuition: $5,000 a year. The grant from Avi Chai was given with the promise of more funding if the school commits to meeting certain milestones. The schools founders expect the school to be self-supporting within several years. One of the school’s major lures is its tuition, considerably less than that of other day schools. The school expects to keep costs down through lower expenditures on teaching staff than a typical Jewish day school. Instead, students will be assigned to their own computer portal pages through which they will access computer-based instructional materials, including lectures conducted or prerecorded by off-site instructors. Students’ progress also will be tracked online.

Names, Not Numbers is a copyrighted oral history film project and curriculum, created by Tova Fish-Rosenberg in 2004. Unique features of the project include the academic, integrated, multidisciplinary curriculum, combining research through Internet web sites, video production, interviewing techniques, documentary film tools, and editing. Throughout the project, the students work with professional adults--a local newspaper editor, a filmmaker, and Jewish studies teachers. After the training and research, the students gain first - hand knowledge through being paired with and given the opportunity to interview and videotape Holocaust survivors, World War II veterans who liberated camps, survivors who later immigrated to pre-1948 Israel, and second generation, who are now living in the same communities as the students.

Jewish educators are understandably interested in research on how bar/bat mitzvah affect Jewish education or research on what Jewish schools have done to avoid the distortions of a focus on bar/bat mitzvah. Research might also focus on the somewhat different and more ambitious topic of the role that bar/bat mitzvah play in contemporary Jewish identity. Three examples—the meaning of bar/bat mitzvah in intermarried families, bar/bat mitzvah as a ritual entry into early adolescence, and how bar/bat mitzvah perform values—indicate how this larger research agenda might be useful to those rethinking the role of bar/bat mitzvah in Jewish supplementary school education.