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.
