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Inside the Jewish School

Samuel Heilman

Originally comissioned and published by the American Jewish Committee

One of the seminal research pieces on Jewish education

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Prior research in field of Jewish education:
Pedagogy, curriculum, administration, educational philosophy

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Samuel Heilman
Methodology: Social anthropologist and ethnographer
Focus: Social environment and culture inside the Jewish school
Goal: Uncover and expose the institutional norms, the “taken-for-granted life” of the
institution, and identify common trends

Viewing the Jewish school as a microcosm of Jewish society

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Research:
Total of 100 hours in three schools in the United States,
Orthodox day school, Conservative afternoon school, Reform afternoon school
Also based on his own familiarity as student and teacher in similar institutions

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Geertz: Underlying assumption of all education, and especially Jewish education, is that
we are incomplete and finish ourselves through particular forms of culture

Classical educational approach emphasizes completion through knowledge – to be a

complete Jew is to know what Jews do and what they have done.

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Cultural Tension

Prerequisite for learning proposed by Heilman: “Feeling Jewish”

• Identification with Jewish life, culture and people
• Appreciation of the role that Jewish learning can play in one’s life

Absence of such “attachment” leads to feelings of alienation,

“which will directly and negatively affect the educational process” (305)

Dissonance can also arise

if teachers embrace a different form of Jewish life from the students
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Results of cultural tension:
“Flooding Out” (Erving Goffman)

Def: Disruption of classroom involvement resulting in a break in the learning activity

(Talking out of turn, breaking into laughter, radically changing the subject, etc.)

Contagious:
“Should one participant fail to maintain prescribed attention,
other participants are likely to become alive to his fact” and respond,
thereby in turn departing from the previous classroom activity

“As the tension level increases, so the likelihood of flooding out increases”

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Not unusual to find a third of class time taken up
with matters of structuring and maintaining student involvement

Why is there so much cultural tension in Jewish schools, resulting in “flooding out?”

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Patterns:
“When the matters being learned or discussed are difficult to assimilate
for social, intellectual or cultural reasons . . . students are likely to flood out”

“Students who have a sense of marginality . . . are most likely to initiate or

enthusiastically participate in flooding out.” (309)

Flooding out signals the presence of cultural dissonance

(even if students are unaware of this tension)

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Responses to flooding out

Students: Often social pressures that encourage them to join in the flooding out,
“a tacit agreement among the participants to limit their engagement”

[Successful] Teachers: Willingness to move with the flow, “allow digressions as long
as [they] do not lead to disruptions and seem in some way associated with Jewish
learning.”

Administrators: Shift in focus of learning from content knowledge to student attitudes

– “haymish environment”
“I am happy if I can get my students to the point
where they are happy to come to school here”
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The Haymish Jewish School
Where student attitudes are emphasized over content knowledge

For many contemporary Jewish children, Hebrew school is the only environment:
• which celebrates Judaism as a civilization
• where they are completely surrounded by other Jews
• where students feel comfortable using “Jewish vocabulary”
• where differences between Jews and Gentiles are easily expressed

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Results of this environment:

Community Building
Comfortable relationships among students and between students in staff
(Possibly leading to residual feelings of comforts with other Jews)

Cultural Discovery
“the child learns what it means to be a Jew . . .
can form and discover [the] relationship to both
. . . ethnic Jewishness and . . . religious Judaism . . .
to see the world from a Jewish perspective” (314)

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Jewish Schools don’t Fail

“Every culture creates the characters best fitted to survive in that culture” (Wheelis)

Jewish community, instead of being altered by the education it provides,

perpetuates itself along with all its attendant problems” (321)

Accurate description of school’s essential goals: enculturation and socialization

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Policy Recommendations

1. Cultural preparation prior to the beginning of Jewish education

2. Shared Jewish culture between teachers and students
3. “Professionalization” – making Jewish teaching a vocation
4. Closer relationships between school and home
5. Prioritization of Religious School in life of family
6. Recognition of the cultural dissonance implicit in the Jewish school
environment
7. New systems of evaluation
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Conclusion:

“If we form communities in which being Jewish is a positive and active element of life,
then we shall produce Jewish human beings, and our schools will ineluctably reflect
that success. If we fail, our school s will mirror that failure.” (330)