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1 Sivan 5761 - May 23, 2001 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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NEWS
Observations: Parents have had Enough of Old-Fashioned Secular Education
by P. Moses

Not all parents who have grown tired of the defective education the Israeli educational system provides their children as an alternative to traditional Jewish education have reached the logical conclusion. Although some parents have elected to transfer their children to Torah schools, others have decided to set up new brands of secular education.

One such innovator is Mr. Shai Or of Emek Chefer, who formed a parents' group to set up a school for their children called Children of the Earth. Twenty-three children are enrolled at the Children of the Earth school, most of who are in First and Second Grade, with a few others attending the kindergarten adjacent to the main schoolhouse.

The pupils are not divided into grades based on their age. The morning opens with a meeting called The Circle, held around a campfire where the children bake their own pitas for breakfast and bring up school-related issues. From this point until the end of the school day everything is open to the students. They run around barefoot, gather sticks and light campfires to their hearts' content, from morning till night.

In order to raise the tuition money the parents hold a local festival every other month where they stage singing and musical appearances, conduct creativity workshops and sell artwork.

The schoolhouse contains many small rooms and does not have a single room large enough for everyone. Mattresses are spread out on the floor among half-burned candles. In the main room are clothes and various fabrics for costume- making. Lining the shelves is an array of raw materials for craft work. Every day the children are given home-style meals cooked on the premises. The smallest room in the schoolhouse is set aside for reading and writing, and the largest is designated for creativity workshops, a decision that is very indicative of the parents' attitude toward structured learning. For now the parents have given up on their attempt to teach reading and writing, and are waiting to see whether the children will generate a demand. All of the rooms are left empty most of the day and none of the pupils know how to read. They prefer to spend their time outside, barefoot and free.

Mr. Or has a highly original approach to education which he made apparent when he held a colorful funeral procession for his father at Kibbutz Beit Zera. The family of the deceased, his wife and three children, were in no hurry to bury him. When he became sick they took care of him at the kibbutz by themselves and avoided sending him to the hospital. After his death they left him in the house for an entire day to allow each of his acquaintances to part from him personally.

Before the funeral the coffin was painted a variety of colors. To begin the funeral procession friends and family set out singing and shaking tambourines. Alongside the grave a song the family was fond of was played, and then Or read a poem his father had written many years previous, in which he says he would die young. To conclude the ceremony, friends and family sang the unofficial hymn of Children of the Earth, composed by Or, who is a musician in his spare time. The song opens with the words, "Beauty spreads out before my eyes, trying to touch me."

Or is convinced that this very individual ceremony managed to touch even those who showed scorn for it at first. "My father was a very special man, who never did things like everyone else," he says. "He lived life to the fullest, and his death reinforced my feeling that he is not another poor guy who breathed his last and now is just a corpse lying in the ground, but that this is his way of dying, and I must accept it. People sensed this. Many of them came up to me with tears in their eyes and told me they hope to have children who will bury them the same way, with love, when the time comes."

During the funeral pupils from Children of the Earth held a discussion about death. A handwritten sign giving notice of the funeral hung on the purple door of the school where Or serves as principal. One month earlier a number of one-day old rabbits from the children's zoo died. The parents, who view death as a part of life, encouraged the children to make the connection between the human death and the death of the animals.

Perhaps Children of the Earth is an extreme example of the educational framework set up by the parents, but it is certainly not the only example. Recently government schools have seen a tremendous wave of withdrawal. Since March thirteen license requests have been filed at the Ministry of Education by parents' associations. In most of these cases the initiative was taken by parents who wanted to set up a school according to their own views on education, in order to be involved in the curriculum and to exert an influence on class size and teacher selection.

 

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