Devora Steinmetz

School and Society: The Case of Beit Rabban

“Is this the workshop of the nation’s soul?” This is the question

that is asked in Hayim Nachman Bialik’s famous poem, Hamatmid, as

the poet offers a portrait of the Lithuanian yeshiva and

considers the nature of this institution in relation to his

aspirations for his people. Bialik’s question is as critical

today, in relation to our own educational institutions, as it was

a century ago.

Many would agree that educational institutions play a crucial

role in the shaping of young people to take their place in

society, indeed in the shaping of the future society itself. Yet

questions about the nature of that role, what it is and what it

should be, have been the subject of longstanding discussion and

debate. Scholars from the fields of sociology and anthropology as

well as education and philosophy have weighed in both on the role

that educational institutions have played and do play in the

enculturation of children and on whether schools should play a

role—and, if so, what kind of role—in the reshaping of culture

and society through the education of children.1 While it is

widely agreed that one of the goals of schooling is to socialize

children to be participants in their culture, the perspective of

this paper is that this important goal can be met too well if

schools educate children only to succeed in society as it is

rather than educating children to help envision a society that

expresses their highest values and to help build such a society.2

This paper does not seek systematically to explain or defend this

claim about the role of schools in reshaping society; rather, the

paper is addressed to those who are sympathetic or open to this

perspective. The paper offers a case study of a school that was

founded on the belief that education of children ought to do more

than socialize children to be full participants in the society as

it is, that schools can and should teach children to participate

in and be shapers of a better society. The goal of the paper is

to demonstrate how specific practices of the school were designed

to foster a way of thinking, a way of looking at the world, and a

set of dispositions that enabled children both to participate in

their society and culture and to take appropriately critical

stances toward that society and culture.

The examples that follow are drawn from Beit Rabban, a Jewish day

school that I founded on the West Side of Manhattan in 1991. I

led the school in its early years, and all of the examples below

are drawn from the years in which I was deeply involved in the

school. The educational vision of Beit Rabban is discussed in

great detail in Daniel Pekarsky’s recent book Vision at Work: The

Theory and Practice of Beit Rabban.3 The discussion of Beit Rabban here

is intended to complement Pekarsky’s work by focusing on a

particular aspect of Beit Rabban’s educational approach and by

offering concrete examples of how that approach was embodied in

the day to day practices of the school.

Beit Rabban saw itself, to borrow Bialik’s phrase, as a workshop

in which children would grow to participate in as well as to

refashion and rebuild their culture and their communities.

Community service was an integral part of Beit Rabban’s

curriculum, with the twin goals of habituating children from the

youngest age to help others who are in need and of teaching

children how to approach difficult social problems so that they

grow to see themselves not only as responsible to serve but as

capable of serving.4 In this paper I do not focus on the community

service program itself but rather on a variety of ways in which

the school cultivated certain kinds of dispositions and ways of

looking at the world. The overall experience of children in the

school fostered a stance that runs counter to many of the hidden

assumptions on which our society and our communal institutions

are built. At its core, Beit Rabban challenged many of the givens

of schooling as well as of contemporary Jewish and general

society. It was the combination of the values, dispositions, and

ways of looking at the world that were embedded in the overall

experience of children in the school with the explicit values,

ways of thinking, and commitment to practice that were expressed

in the community service program that encouraged children to

develop their ability to participate in society as envisioners

and agents of change rather than as members whose success is

measured in the degree to which they assimilate into and

recapitulate the norms of society as it is.

I will offer concrete examples from a variety of areas of the

educational experience, including anecdotes that illustrate the

approach to teaching specific areas of the curriculum as well as

discussion of more diffuse but very powerful ways in which the

stance that I have described was embedded in the school culture.

I focus on four crucial dimensions of the school experience: the

emphasis on intellectual autonomy and its relationship to other

kinds of autonomy, including the notion that one should shape

one’s behavior and social interactions in reference to principles

of value and broad goals rather than merely conforming to rules;

the shaping of a culture that is not based on an assumption of

sameness, in which self-respect and respect for others is related

to the recognition that every person has needs that ought to be

met and that what ought to be valued is individual growth and

working to meet challenges rather than inherent ability; the

development of the habit of seeing things from multiple

perspectives, in which each perspective is understood to offer

new questions and insights and sometimes important critiques; and

the nurturing of a community of discourse, in which children

learn to engage each other respectfully as individuals who bring

different ideas and insights to a shared enterprise of learning

and seeking to understand. My goal in focusing on these areas,

rather than on the community service program itself, is to make

the claim that thoughtful, active, and aspirational social

responsibility can best be nurtured in a setting that embodies

these values throughout the total experience of that setting.

A Math Class—Intellectual Autonomy

In this curriculum area that seems most value-neutral, the school

believed that core stances relating to authority, autonomy, risk-

taking, and responsibility could be nurtured. The following

anecdote illustrates these stances and raises several other

important issues relating to the school’s educational approach:

A small group of five-year-olds were playing a math game with their teacher, an activity that was the culmination of a unit on number patterns, working primarily with a hundreds chart (a ten-by-ten grid on which the numbers one to a hundred are arranged in sequence). The game involved one side choosing a secret

number and the other side finding out the number by asking a series of yes-or-no questions such as “is it atwo-digit number,” “is it in the pattern of five” (i.e., is it a multiple of five), “is the first digit larger than the second digit,” until they have ruled out all of the numbers except for the number that they are trying to discover.

In this round, the teacher had chosen the secret number, and the children were asking the questions. At one point, the children asked: “Is the number even?” The teacher said “no.” Based on the information that they had gleaned from the preceding questions, the children thought that the number might be 99, and they needed to find out whether 99 was odd or even. Amy spoke up: “Well, Chana,”—addressing the teacher—“I remember that you said that 100 is odd, so 99 must be even.”

But Amy and the other children wanted to make sure; looking at the location of 100 on the chart, they weren’t convinced that it was, in fact, an odd number. So Amy went to the shelf of math materials and took down a hundreds block (a square wooden slab with a ten-by-ten grid etched on it to give the impression that itis constructed of a hundred small wooden cubes) and worked with the other children on visually sectioning it into groups of even-numbered squares. “No, Chana,” she said when they were done, “100 is even, so 99 must be odd.”

While Chana is certain that she never said that 100 is an odd

number, she does not intervene when Amy says that she remembers

the teacher saying this. Her goal, realized in this episode, is

for the children to do math, which is not about learning facts

from a teacher but about developing mathematical understanding

along with the dispositions to figure things out. She is

confident that the children will not end up thinking that 100 is

odd, and she has no interest in telling the children that 100 is

not odd, so that they will accept that as a fact on the teacher’s

authority. What she wants is for the children to develop a sense

of their own intellectual authority, for the children to be

responsible to the discipline and to the task at hand, and for

the children to be willing to take risks—in short, for the

children to be at once bold and humble5: bold in being willing to

challenge the knowledge that (they think) someone else has

offered them, and humble in subjecting their own ideas to

rigorous examination before deciding to adopt a particular

belief.

What is at play here is a particular take on autonomy, which is

central to the school’s conception of education and to the

school’s goals for the children. Autonomy, here, is understood to

mean what the word’s etymology implies: self-governing. It does

not mean that whatever I think or want goes. It means that I am

governed, but that I am governed by what I understand to be true

and right. Autonomy at Beit Rabban is based on a strong sense of

responsibility, but that responsibility takes the form of working

within broad principles rather than of conforming to particular

ideas or behaviors. Thus, in math, the children are responsible

to think mathematically and to explain their thinking to others,

subjecting their ideas to the norms of mathematical discourse and

opening their reasoning to the scrutiny of their peers. In

reference to behavior, autonomy means reflecting on what behavior

will help achieve the broad goals of the classroom—articulated in

the school as “behaving in a way that helps everyone learn and

feel comfortable.” When teachers do appeal to rules, those rules

are explained in reference to these broad goals.6 Rules and their

explanations are communicated as an exemplar of how children are

expected to think about behavior in relation to these simple

goals. The educational objective is for children to govern their

behavior and their thinking in relation to appropriate principles

and goals, rather than to conform to specific rules handed down

by an authority figure.

There is something else at play in this anecdote, and for this I

need to give a bit more background to the story. A few weeks

before this episode, Amy’s mother had said in passing to Chana:

“I guess Amy’s not so good at math, just like me.” Chana was well

aware of Western cultural assumptions about women and math; in

fact, this episode took place shortly after the time that the

American Association of University Women convinced Mattel to

delete the statement “Math class is tough!” from their “Teen Talk

Barbie”s stock of phrases that were supposed to represent typical

girl-talk. Amy’s mother’s comment reflected several cultural

assumptions about gender, the nature of ability, and the nature

of mathematics. These assumptions, of course, can be powerfully

self-fulfilling; within a culture (family, school, and the

broader culture), these assumptions tend to be verified because

they are embedded in the culture in a way that is self-

recapitulating. As with the cultural bias within segments of the

Jewish community against girls learning Talmud, educators can

point to girls’ underachievement or lack of interest as

verifications of the reality of the phenomenon, without seeing

that these are the result of the very cultural assumptions that

they are being rallied to support.

1 I am indebted to Daniel Pekarsky for helping me to frame this study in the context of ongoing debates about the relationship between school and society.

2 The American thinker who is most closely associated with the idea that schools ought to help shape a better society is, of course, John Dewey. The title of this paper borrows the title of one of his best-known works, The Schooland Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

3 Daniel Pekarsky, Vision at Work: The Theory and Practice of Beit Rabban (New York: JewishTheological Seminary Press, 2006).

4 Community service was a regular part of the weekly class schedule, beginningwith our youngest class, of five and six year old children. The problem-solving approach involved studying about the nature and sources of particular problems, working to design ways of addressing the problems, and implementing and evaluating service projects, as well as meeting with social entrepeneurs to learn about and be inspired by their own processes of figuring out how to address particular needs and their own challenges, successes, and failures in realizing their goals. Beit Rabban’s two-pronged approach to community servicewas based on the idea that it is important for children to develop the disposition and habit of working to help others but that it is also important,if children are not ultimately to give up in the face of overwhelming social problems, to develop the habits of mind that enable people to see themselves as able to tackle, along with others, difficult and challenging problems.

For a description of one community service project in the five/six year old class and a discussion of some issues relating to Beit Rabban’s approach to community service, see Pekarsky, Vision at Work, pp. 71-82. It should be noted that the example on which Pekarsky focuses was somewhat atypical, in that it involved the allocation of tzekaka, rather than an extended service project. Extended projects looked quite different from this example, and of course projects undertaken by older children looked quite different as well. Nevertheless, Pekarsky’s discussion discloses many important aspects of the community service program at Beit Rabban. See also pp. 128-129, where Pekarskydiscusses the interplay of imagination and empathy and how these went hand-in-hand with a problem-solving orientation in Beit Rabban’s community service program.

The educational culture of Beit Rabban was founded on different

assumptions. First, learning experiences were constructed to

approximate the way in which disciplines are experienced by those

who engage in them (this can be seen as well in the anecdote from

the chumash class, below). Thus, mathematics was taught

mathematically, focusing on developing ways of thinking and

seeing and arguing, rather than on facts and teacher-taught

recipes for getting answers. Second, while recognizing that

individuals differ significantly in innate ability (more on this

below, in relation to groupings), the school focused on what

kinds of dispositions and habits of mind (general as well as

5 This phrase is inspired by Lampert’s discussion of Lakatos’ approach to mathematical thinking, which at its best expresses the qualities of “courage and modesty.” See M. Lampert, “The Teacher’s Role is Reinventing the Meaning of Mathematical Knowing in the Classroom” (The Institute for Research on Teaching, College of Education, Michigan State University, 1988), pp. 2-3, discussing I. Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 30.

6 For example, at Beit Rabban children were asked not to raise their hands while others were talking. We explained to the children that raising one’s hand while a child is talking suggests that the teacher should be turning his/her attention to the other child, does not demonstrate interest in what the child who is speaking is saying, and may pressure the child who is speaking to finish expressing his or her thoughts before s/he has fully workedthem out. Instead, children were asked to attend—and to demonstrate their attention—to what other children were saying and to make sure that the child’scomments were fully assimilated and, at times, discussed before offering theirown comments.

particular to specific disciplines) allow people to learn and to

grow in their understanding. Third, instead of seeing individuals

as members of groups—defined by gender or age, for example—the

school took the stance that we have no idea what a person can do;

rather than work with assumptions about what a five-year-old can

or can’t do or what girls or boys can be expected to do, we tried

to create opportunities for each child to grow from where s/he

was without limiting our expectations of that child in relation

to his or her age, gender, or presumed level of ability.

And so, while Amy learns to think mathematically and to engage

with her classmates in shared inquiry about a mathematical

question, she is also learning about her own intellectual

authority, she is developing the boldness to challenge given

wisdom, and she is developing the sense that she has the capacity

to engage in rich thinking and decision-making through the

application of well-directed effort (rather than limiting her

efforts or her sense of self-efficacy by categorizing herself in

relation to her age, gender, or presumed mathematical ability).

It is these qualities that might enable Amy and her classmates to

be responsible questioners of the givens of the broader society

rather than unwitting participants in the recapitulation of those

norms.

Groupings—“No Assumption of Sameness”

Classes at Beit Rabban generally spanned at least two traditional

age groupings, but most of the subject learning in the school

occurred in small groups, sometimes based on ability or

experience and sometimes based on other criteria. While such

groupings in schools often serve to solidify societal

categorizations of people into more- and less-valued groups,

children at Beit Rabban experienced these groupings differently

because of their participation in a school culture that focused

on individual needs and that was shaped in a deep way by what I

came to call “no presumption of sameness.” It is the very

presumption of sameness, hidden within and powerfully shaping

standard educational settings, that makes differences—such as in

ability, socio-economic class, or religious observance—so

problematic within those settings.

A counter-anecdote:

A mother and son visit a high school known for its openness and commitment to pluralism. The yo’etzet speaksat some length about how the school is built on the principle of respect for children. When it is time for questions, the mother explains that her son is very mathematically able and has completed most of the standard high school math curriculum—would it be possible, in this setting, for him to take a more advanced math class than the standard freshman course? “Well,” says the yo’etzet, “we’d have to talk with the other children and see how they feel about it. We couldn’t do it if it would make the other children feelbad.”

From the perspective of Beit Rabban, the yo’etzet’s comment

reflects a miscontrual of what it means to respect people, and it

is a mistake that can only be made when one starts from an

assumption of sameness.

When one starts with an assumption of sameness, difference is a

problem. Difference is a source of embarrassment, whether because

you feel that you don’t measure up or because you feel that

someone else exceeds the norm. Difference is never neutral when

the starting point is a presumption of sameness. This point is

obvious when we look at how ability groups tend to be named in

schools. Elementary schools might call class reading groups “the

robins” and “the bluebirds.” And, absurdly, at least one yeshiva

high school calls its tracks “high honors,” “honors,” and

“accellerated,” in a well-meaning but misguided nod to the myth

that all of our children are intellectually gifted, while at the

same time perpetuating the idea that being more able is somehow

worthy of honor. Kids know of course that the names of these

tracks just mean what they call “smart,” “average,” and “dumb,”

and the school’s attempt to hide the nature of the different

tracks just serves to strengthen the cultural assumption that

difference in academic ability or achievement must be greatly

embarrassing.

Modern schools in the Western world are constructed on the

presumption of sameness. The relatively recent practice of

grouping children in classes based on chronological age, of

offering all children of the same age more or less the same

curriculum, and of grading children based on where they fall in

relation to a norm for children of that age (or for that class)

all emerge from and express the conception that all children of a

certain age are—or should be—in the same place in relation to

their intellectual development. (It goes without saying that our

cultural practices in relation to other domains are not based on

this assumption at all: whether we look to instruction in musical

instruments, participation in sports, or virtually any other

practice outside of a school setting, there is a level of

individualization that reflects a very different assumption than

that which shapes academic instruction in schools.) Within such a

setting, we can at best try to work with people to be tolerant of

difference, but we’ve started in the wrong place, and we will

have a partial victory at best. Hence, the yo’etzet’s concern that

acknowledging a child's mathematical ability through a more

advanced placement might offend the other students. Difference,

in such a setting, will always imply better or worse, and respect

for children would seem to dictate that we hide such value-laden

difference.

As I noted, the yo’etzet’s comment, besides being grounded in a

setting shaped, like most schools, by an assumption of sameness,

reflects an unfortunate conception of respect—what I would

describe as a facile and faulty conception of self-esteem. This

form of self-esteem is common in contemporary Western culture,

and it has several features that I think are highly problematic

and miseducative. Parents and educators are taught that self-

esteem is the most important thing that they can give a child,

but the self-esteem that they are taught to offer is based on the

approval of others and is fostered by often disingenuous messages

of authority figures. Comments such as “You are great,” “You’re

so special,” or “Aren’t you brilliant,” offered as boosts to

self-esteem, also lack the kind of substance and specificity that

might help children focus their efforts on specific goals and

standards. Moreover, they suggest that the child’s attributes are

fixed, rather than demanding the effort that it takes to meet new

goals and challenges. Finally, the form of self-esteem that is

other-dependant and that suggests that a child is inherently

wonderful can creates a dependancy on getting such positive

messages7—which means that children might limit themselves to

situations in which they can expect to meet with success, even if7 Alternatively, some children decide that the adults around them are not really to be trusted to give their true opinion, which is problematic not onlybecause of the loss of trust but also because of the lessened opportunity for those adults to serve as sources of valuable guidance.

that means setting their sights very low, rather than growing to

be risk-takers, to venture into areas that might pose difficulty,

or learning to to work hard to meet new challenges. (The comment

that young children often make while doing schoolwork—“This is

easy!”—expresses the bias toward a self-concept that is based on

fixed ability and approval of others rather than on hard work and

growth in meeting challenges.)8

The educational environment of Beit Rabban, in contrast, was not

based on an assumption of sameness, and the conception within the

school of self-esteem and respect for others was radically

different from that which is expressed in the yo’etzet anecdote. At

Beit Rabban, teachers worked with the understanding that everyone

reads differently, thinks differently, learns differently, has

different ways of engaging with what they are learning, plays

sports differently, has different interests, and so on. The

structure of mixed-age core classes supported this intuition.9

The practice of grouping children by age, as noted, is based on

8 For a discussion of research that supports some of these claims about the contemporary approach to self-esteem, see C. Dweck, Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development (Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis, 2000).

the assumption that all children of a certain age are (or should

be) ready to learn the same thing in the same way, so deviating

from this standard practice inherently helps to undermine this

assumption. Multi-age groupings, which more closely approximate

the way in which children interact in non-institutional settings,

allow for natural interactions between children of different ages

and levels of ability and experience. For example, in a five-six

year old class, one might see a six-year-old who is just

beginning to read calling over a five-year-old who is already a

fluent reader to help read the menu of activities that are

available during the explorations period. This is what happens in

real life, where I know that you play piano better than I; and

you, an accomplished pianist, should feel good only if you are

playing as well as you can play, not if you are playing better

than I can play; and I, a late beginner to music lessons, should

feel good if I am improving in my playing, not feel bad because I

don’t play as well as you. And so, if you are particularly able

in math, it goes without saying that your educational needs must

be met, and your placement in an advanced math class is no more

an affront to me than your having more advanced piano lessons.10

Within a setting such as this, where there is no assumption of

sameness, grouping children into small groups based on ability or

experience is not a source of embarrassment or disappointment.

The awareness that informs the school, shared by both teachers

and children, is that everyone should be getting what s/he needs

in order to learn best. There is no “smart” and “dumb,” because

no one is being measured based on a norm of sameness. There are

simply individual children who are all working hard to grow by

being challenged in a way that is appropriate for each one.

Educating children in an environment that is based on no

assumption of sameness develops several modes of consciousness 9 Of course, mixed-age grouping does not necessarily support this; it depends on how mixed-age grouping is put into practice and how teachers approach the children in the class. I remember a preliminary interview for a teacher for the school’s first year, when we were anticipating opening with four students,two of whom were five and two of whom were six years old. The prospective teacher said: “Oh, I see. So I would need to teach a kindergarten curriculum and a first grade curriculum.”

10 This is not to deny the very different valence that intellectual achievement has in our culture from other kinds of achievement, especially during the school years. And school culture, of course, cannot be completely immune from the value judgments of the general culture. Nevertheless, the orientation that I am describing does go a long way toward establishing a verydifferent set of assumptions within the school, and it helps children develop the ability to question the way in which the general culture assigns value to different kinds of achievement.

and dispositions that are different from those that characterize

standard educational settings that are shaped by the assumption

of sameness. Since everyone gets what s/he needs, everyone feels

respected. Moving between groups is often a collaborative

decision: “This will be more of a challenge; do you think that

you want to take this on?” a teacher might say; or “This will

give you a bit more support; do you want to try it for awhile and

we’ll discuss whether it’s working better for you?” It is neither

an honor to move to a more advanced group nor an embarrassment to

move to a less-advanced group; it is simply a matter of what will

help the child to grow.

Since each child works hard on a level that is challenging for

him or her, children do not develop the dispositions that I

described above as resulting from a faulty understanding of how

adults should develop children’s self-esteem. In this setting,

instead of hearing a child boast “that was easy,” one might hear

a child say to the teacher, “Adina, that was too easy for me; can

you give me something more challenging?” Children do not learn

that achievement without effort is worthy of praise; children

with more natural ability in a given subject work as hard as

children with less, and so no one develops a false sense of self-

esteem that is based on relative ability (“I’m smarter than him”)

rather than on effort and thinking (“I worked really hard on this

problem, and I’m proud that I was able to figure it out”). An

able child does not learn to scorn others who are struggling to

do what comes easily to him or her, or to resent a child who is

holding him or her back while the teacher needs to review

material that s/he has already mastered. A child who is less

advanced in a given subject feels challenged at the level that

s/he needs to be growing from, and, having his or her educational

needs met, feels respected and valued. The fact that there are

other children who are getting more advanced work is not an

affront to his or her self-esteem. And all children learn to take

risks, since they are always confronting challenging material and

their self-esteem is based on working hard to learn new things

rather than on finding things easy, being better at something

than their peers, or being praised by an authority figure.

Besides the very different dispositions and self-concept that are

nurtured in a setting such as this, there are at least two

important learnings about others that children educated in such a

setting develop. One has to do with respect for others, both in

the sense of truly believing that each person can learn and grow

through interaction with others, since every person brings a

different perspective and insight, and in the ethical commitment

to making sure that each person’s needs are met. Because in a

culture of not-sameness people do not stack up on a better or

worse spectrum relative to a norm, children experience each

person as a unique individual rather than as a more- or less-

valued member of a group. And because children understand how

their own needs are being met and see that others have different

needs and that the institutional structure is designed to meet

each child’s needs, they come to recognize that meeting each

person’s individual needs is not a matter of privilege nor is it

optional. Rather, one needs to figure out how, in every setting

in which one participates, one can help make sure that s/he is

doing his or her best to meet everyone’s needs.

The other thing that children learn about others is perhaps

better characterized as something that they do not learn.

Children educated in such a setting tend not to categorize people

in groups to the degree that people do so in the general culture.

Because they participate in a culture with no assumption of

sameness, because within this culture each person is unique—not

pretty much the same but marked as different in culturally

significant ways—children do not categorize each other as smart

or dumb, rich or poor, religious or not-religious. But note that

this is not because children are being educated in a setting that

is based on the fiction that we are all the same! On the

contrary, it is because children are being educated in a setting

that never begins with the idea of sameness at all. Perhaps a

small anecdote is the best way to illustrate this subtle but very

significant difference in consciousness:

A middle-school child who attended Beit Rabban through sixth grade but was now attending a traditional Modern Orthodox day school told his mother one day: “You know,mom, I never realized that at Beit Rabban some of the children in my class weren’t observant.” “Well, of course you did,” the mother replied, “Remember how you were always careful about what snack you would eat whenIlan offered to share with you on the bus home from

school?” “Yeah, I know,” Joseph said, “But I never realized that that meant that he wasn’t observant!”

What Joseph is saying is that he had never categorized Ilan

before. Sure, he knew that Ilan’s family didn’t eat only kosher

food; this was relevant to Joseph because he wouldn’t share

Ilan’s snack without first checking whether it was kosher. But

that was that. Now, attending a school where (despite the

existence of a variety of levels of religious observance) there

is a presumption of sameness, Joseph had begun to learn to see

people through the lens of categories. Suddenly, Ilan was a

member of a group of non-observant Jews. Joseph doesn’t now have

any information about Ilan that he didn’t have before, but the

way in which he sees people has shifted. Difference, now, means

belonging to a different group, and difference between groups, of

course, is rarely value-neutral.

It goes without saying that the Joseph anecdote raises critical

questions about the sticking power of the values, insights, and

dispositions that a counter-cultural school like Beit Rabban—and,

in a particular, a school for young children—attempts to shape.

What happens when children move on to other schools and communal

settings that are powerful vectors of dominant cultural values

and dispositions? This is a critical question to which I do not

have an adequate answer. I do think, though, that children

continue to carry with them at least some of the values,

dispositions, and habits of mind and heart that they develop in

their early years. And, of course, children participate in many

cultures simultaneously, and I would hope that parents who

embrace some of the counter-cultural values of a school like Beit

Rabban continue to support the development of these values after

their child has moved on to other educational settings. But,

perhaps most important, I would hope that the example of a school

like Beit Rabban, which was self-consciously designed to express

and nurture the values and dispositions discussed here, would

encourage others to critically examine how their own settings

might better embody and communicate crucial habits of mind and

heart.

Interdisciplinary Study—Multiple Perspectives

Alexander the Macedonian . . . went to another country, and its name was Afriki.

They went out to greet him with gold apples and gold pomegranates and gold bread.

He said: “Is this what you eat in your land?” They said to him: “But don’t you have this [i.e.,

regular food] in your land—that you came here [i.e., insearch of something else]?”

He said to them: “I didn’t come to see your riches, I came to see your judgment.”

Meanwhile, two men came before the king for judgment. . . .

One of them said: “I bought a ruins from this man;I dug in it, and I found a treasure, and I said to him:‘Take your treasure—I bought a ruins from you, not a treasure.’”

And the other said: “When I sold the ruins to thisman, I sold it and anything that is in it to him.”

The king called one of them and said to him: “Do you have a son?” He said to him: “Yes.”

The king called the other one and said to him: “Doyou have a daughter?” He said to him: “Yes.”

He said to them: “Marry them to each other and letboth of them enjoy the treasure.”

Alexander was amazed. The king said to him: “Why are you amazed? Did I

not judge well?” “Yes,” he said. “Had this case been in your land,” he said to him,

“how would you have judged it?” He said to him: “We would remove the head of this

one and remove the head of the other one, and the treasure would go to the royal treasury.”

He said to him: “Does rain fall in your land?” He said: “Yes.”

“And does sun shine on you?” He said: “Yes.”

“Do you have small livestock in your land?” He said: “Yes.”

“A curse on that man; it is in the merit of the small livestock that you are saved.”11

In February 2005, the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude installed

“The Gates” in New York City’s Central Park. The project was

twenty-six years in the making and was said to have cost an

estimated twenty-one million dollars. Approximately 600

volunteers came from across the country to help install the 7,500

“saffron”-colored cloth banners on twenty-three miles of

footpaths throughout the park. The media devoted enormous amounts

of coverage to the event, and over a million people, including

thousands of foreign tourists, are estimated to have gone to

Central Park to see the installation.

It is easy to get swept up in the excitement and energy of an

event like “The Gates.” The fact that it is the work of famous

artists is enough, in a culture which tends to venerate art, to

grant the event special status. The fact that these artists

dedicated a huge amount of time to it and invested a massive

11 Vayiqra Rabba 27:1.

amount of money in it, the sheer physical scale of the project,

the effort that it took to convince the City to allow the

installation, and the dedication of the many volunteers who put

up the poles and at last unfurled the banners one cold Saturday

morning all added to the sense of the project’s magnitude and

importance.

But how do we want our children to respond to such an event?

Perhaps we would like them to question whether this project

should be considered art in the first place—does the fact that

someone whom society recognizes as a famous artist says it is art

mean that it is art? That it is good art? And, even if it is art,

does that grant the project value that is commensurate with the

kind of money, time, and attention that has been dedicated to it?

Who is to say what is of value, and who is to judge how to

measure the value of a particular project? Is there an inherent

problem with investing this amount of money and volunteer work on

a project such as this in a city where basic human needs are not

being met for many, many people—even if the money was contributed

by the artists themselves from sales of their work, and the

volunteers came from across the country specifically to work on

this project? Does the fact that the event brought many tourists

to the city, putting over a quarter of a billion dollars into the

city’s economy, make the project worthwhile?

I think that the answers to these questions are not

straightforward, but I think that questions such as these need to

be asked. Or, rather, I think that we need to educate children in

such a way that asking such questions will be second-nature to

them, that they will be able to engage in their cultural world

without being taken in by the givens of that world. If children

grow to simply accept the importance of what their dominant

culture appears to value—money, fame, media attention, particular

definitions of beauty—then how can we hope that they will be able

to step back from the tyranny of these messages in order to ask

important questions about value? How can we hope to grant them

some freedom from the cultural forces that seek to control how we

spend our time and money, our life choices, our thinking, and our

awareness of things that lie outside the sphere of interest of

those forces?

Beit Rabban’s deep embedding within its culture of the stance

toward authority and autonomy discussed in relation to the math

anecdote is one response to this. The Caldecott example discussed

in Pekarsky’s Vision at Work12 is an example of a more explicit way

in which issues related to value—who determines what is of value,

and on the basis of what criteria may something be determined to

be of value—might emerge as a focus of discussion in the

school.13 And these questions are related as well to the issue of

self-esteem that was raised in the discussion of groupings, where

I argued against the contemporary version of self-esteem that

depends on the judgment of an authority figure outside of oneself

and that is based on vague, often hyperbolic statements of value

12 p. 29.

13 In brief: A class of five- and six-year olds were looking at picture books and noticed the picture of a medal on the cover of some of the books. The teacher explained that the Caldecott Medal is given each year to outstanding picture books. The children wanted to know who gave it and on what basis it was given. So the teacher found out who grants the award and helped the children write a letter asking for information about the medal. The letter that came in reply didn’t say much about the criteria that were used to judge a picture book excellent, so the children decided to design their own medal and to discuss among themselves what features of a picture book might make a book worthy of special recognition.

without reference to any standards or criteria about what makes

something worthy of such a judgment.

Here, I want to offer two brief examples that focus on another

feature of the school’s educational approach, the way in which

multiple perspectives were built into the curriculum in the form

of interdisciplinary study, which complemented discipline-based

study. In the earliest grades, children engaged in a variety of

interdisciplinary units over the course of the year; my second

example is drawn from one of these units, Plants and Food.

Beginning in second or third grade, children would begin a four-

year course of interdisciplinary social studies which integrated

history, literature, the arts and, where appropriate, Jewish

studies. My first example is taken from this curriculum. The

first example is one in which there is an explicit attempt to

develop a critical stance toward dominant cultural values, while

the second example is offered to show how the habit of looking at

things from multiple perspectives permeates school activities

even in politically neutral activities and even in the earliest

grades.

1) One year of the interdisciplinary social studies sequence was

dedicated to the study of Ancient Cultures. We focused on four

major cultures that resonate strongly with the story of the

Jewish people: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Even in most

Jewish day schools, these cultures are taught in isolation from

Jewish history and Jewish ideas. Mesopotamia is not considered as

the place that the Torah describes Avraham as leaving behind;

Mesopotamian religion and beliefs about fate are not looked at

through the lens of midrashim about Avraham rejecting astrology

and being asked by God to embrace the notion of human

possibility.14 Greece and Rome are portrayed as the birth-places

of democracy and individual freedom and as epitomizing ideals of

beauty and order. I still remember the Doric, Ionic, and

Corinthian columns whose names I memorized in fifth grade, but I

don’t remember being asked to wonder how I might integrate the

classical view of these great cultures with the awareness that

the Romans destroyed the beit hamiqdash or the knowledge that each

14 See Rashi on Bereshit 15:5, synthesizing Bereshit Rabba 44:10 and 12 and bNedarim 32a.

Chanuka we celebrate our victory against the domination of Greek

culture.

Rabbinic texts, of course, offer a very different picture of

Greek and Roman culture than the one that is offered by our

textbooks. Midrashim often portray these cultures as

hypocritical, as paying lip-service to their advanced system of

justice while being irredeemably corrupt. The story cited at the

beginning of this section mocks Alexander’s need to expand his

empire (Doesn’t he have food to eat in his own land?) and offers

an idyllic counter-vision of virtuous people governed by a

righteous king—a culture of generosity and justice to contrast

with what is portrayed as a culture of insatiable greed and quest

for power.15

The point in looking at such passages with the children is not to

suggest that we should (even if we could!) reject the

contributions of these classical cultures to our contemporary way

15 See the parallel to the Vayiqra Rabba passage in bTamid 32a-b and the briefstory there about Alexander and the insatiable eye.

of life. The point, rather, is to consider the tension between

two perspectives: that offered by the dominant culture that sees

itself as the inheritor of the classical tradition and that

offered by our traditional texts and our national story, in which

our people and way of life were violently challenged by the

bearers of classical culture—despite, without question, being

shaped by that culture as well. Recognizing the ways in which we

are heirs to many values of a culture and, at the same time, can

use our identity as a sub-group with our own particular values to

critique both the values and the actual behavior of that culture

serves as important practice in developing an appropriately

critical stance toward the values and actions of our own

contemporary culture.

2) One extended inquiry in the Plants and Food curriculum for

five- and six-year olds focused on the different ways in which we

categorize foods that come from plants. Children would learn

about the life-cycle of a fruit-bearing plant and about the

structure and function of plant parts and the morphological

relationship between a flower and a fruit. From a botanical

perspective, they would find out, cucumbers and tomatoes are

fruits.

But the point was not for the children to go home and tease

younger siblings who make the “mistake” at dinnertime of calling

a tomato a vegetable. Children would participate in other

activities designed to show that there are multiple ways in which

we can and do categorize foods that come from plants, and that

each way in which we categorize these foods refracts our

experience through a different kind of lens. One such activity,

which would take place entirely in Hebrew, as part of our natural

language, partial immersion16 Hebrew program, is the following:

With two large bowls set out on the table, one labelled salat perot

and the other labelled salat yeraqot, children would work together

on washing, peeling, and cutting a variety of fruits and

vegetables and placing them in the appropriate bowl. A follow-up

discussion after the Hebrew lesson17 would challenge the children

to explain what made something go into the bowl of fruit salad or

the bowl of vegetable salad. In fact, while within our own

culture we all pretty much agree about what we consider to be a

fruit or a vegetable (and that is true even for those of us who

might throw some fruit into our vegetable salads), it is almost

impossible to state criteria that account for what makes

something a fruit or a vegetable within our cultural construct.

Children generate suggestions such as “If it’s juicy, it’s a

fruit,” only to note that tomatoes are much juicier than apples.

“Fruits are sweeter” gets knocked down by the example of a lemon.

And yet, the fact that we can’t generate a rule for our

categories doesn’t challenge the existence of those categories;

the categories of fruit and vegetable are categories that shape

and express our experience of these foodstuffs within the culture

in which those experiences take place.

Now, at the same time, the children are learning about berakhot on

food. Typically, children are told that we say borei peri ha‘etz on

fruits and borei peri ha’adama on vegetables. Then, children (and

many adults) spend years being confused about the berakha for

strawberries and peanuts and bananas and pineapples and melons.

At Beit Rabban, children learn the meaning of berakhot and tefilot as

they are introduced to them, and so children learn that borei peri

ha‘etz is said on produce that grows on trees and borei peri ha’adama

is said on produce that grows from the ground but not on trees.

Here, then, is a third categorization of foods that come from

plants: in addition to the botanical definition of fruits, which

is based on function within the life-cycle of the plant, and the

common categories of fruits and vegetables, which are based on

we-can’t-quite-figure-out what but which express our cultural

experience of these foods, berakhot categorize food from plants

based on how they grow. Most probably, as the language of the

berakhot suggests, they reflect and serve to direct our attention

16 The term “partial immersion” refers to using an immersion methodology for only part of the day; it does not mean that the methodology is only partially employed, as in the common practice of using quite a bit of English during a Hebrew lesson. The term “natural language” refers to a methodology in which a second language in taught using techniques that are significantly modeled on the way in which a child acquires his or her native language.

17 The model of language instruction that we used mandated exclusive use of Hebrew during the times of day that were designated as Hebrew lessons (though,in addition, Hebrew was used as appropriate at many other times throughout theday). Since, early on, the children’s level of comprehension and expressive language was still limited, we would focus during Hebrew lessons on relativelyconcrete activities that allowed for rich language use. If there was a relateddiscussion the conceptual level of which demanded more sophisticated language,we would hold that discussion outside of the rubric of the Hebrew lesson in order to avoid limiting either the amount of time spent speaking in Hebrew or the conceptual level of the inquiry. Since all teachers in the early grades taught both Jewish and general studies, we had the flexibility to work in thisway rather than having to choose between the quantity of Hebrew use and the conceptual quality of the discussion, a choice that is often pointed to as an intractable quandary that day schools face.

to the story of creation, in which vegetation is divided into the

categories of fruit-bearing trees and grasses.18

As a culmination of this inquiry, each child receives the name of

a plant-food that they are to research in order to answer the

following questions:

Do you call this a fruit or a vegetable?Would a botanist consider this to be a fruit? Explain why.What berakha does one make on this? Explain why.

Children learn through their own and other’s research that

bananas, which we call a fruit, are also considered by botanists

to be a fruit, because they are the fleshy case for the tiny

ovules that can be found inside. They also learn that bananas do

not grow on true trees; the trunk of a banana tree does not have

a woody stem and it only lasts for one fruit-bearing season.

Obviously, there are many, many things—both knowledge and habits

of mind—that children learn from inquiries such as this. But the

main point of this cluster of activities shaped into an

18 Bereshit 1:11-12. See mBerakhot 6:1 and note the opinion of R. Yehuda in relation to the language of the biblical text.

interdisciplinary inquiry is to help the children develop the

awareness that how we categorize things reflects and helps to

shape points of view. Just as the goal of the botanical

exploration is not for a child to rally the botanist’s definition

to correct the sibling who calls a tomato a vegetable, the goal

of the cluster of explorations is not for a child to throw up his

or her hands in an “it’s whatever you want to call it” surrender

to relativism. The point, rather, is for children to come to

appreciate what they encounter in the world through a rich set of

multiple lenses, each of which helps them to see something new

that they didn’t see before. At the same time, it is critical for

children to come to understand that any one lens, in helping to

bring some features sharply into focus, of necessity obscures

other things.

The fruit and vegetable inquiry and the study of Greece and Rome

are not designed to suggest that one perspective trumps and

invalidates another. Nor are they designed to suggest that the

very act of taking a perspective is false and that all truth is

relative. Nor is the practice of multiple-perspective-taking

meant to create a stance of detachment, to distance the children

from experiencing the activities of their culture fully. Children

will still make fruit and vegetable salads, but hopefully they

will appreciate the symmetry of the seed arrangement when they

are slicing tomatoes or cucumbers and think a bit about how

strawberries grow when they say the berakha before eating them.

In other words, the goal is to enrich the children’s

participation in the life of their community while helping them

to keep in mind that there are multiple perspectives on what is

going on and that other perspectives bring new insights and,

sometimes, important critiques.

Chumash Learning—A Community of Discourse

The children in the first-year chumash class are discussing the questions that they worked on for homework in relation to Bereshit 9:6: “One who spills the blood of a human being by a human being shall his blood be spilled, because in the image of God he made the human being.” These questions were raised by Yiska toward the end of yesterday’s class:19

1) “How does the end of the verse (‘because in the image of God . . .’) explain the first part ofthe verse?”2) “If someone kills the person who killed, and then someone else kills that person, and someone

kills that person . . . won’t people keep killing each other?”

Elisha begins today’s discussion by addressing the first question: “I think that the verse is saying that a person is special; if you kill someone, you’re killing the image of God.”

Amram: “But animals are also in the image of God.”

Elisha: “Look at chapter one, verse . . .”

The children begin to look for the verse that would clarify this issue and suggest different possibilities,finally deciding to read 1:27: “God created the human being in his image, in the image of God he created him,male and female he created them.” The children discuss whether the Torah says that animals as well as human beings are created in the image of God.20

Nachman: “Elisha, I don’t understand how what you said answers the question about how the second part of the verse explains the first part.”

Elisha: “God takes revenge if God’s image is destroyed—so people, when they kill a murderer, are taking revenge on God’s behalf.”

19 This class takes place entirely in Hebrew, and the homework assignment is in Hebrew as well. I offer here a rough English translation of the children’s questions and comments. It should be noted that the discussion is reconstructed from detailed notes; it is not based on an actual recording or transcript of the class. Also, this rendering omits some parts of the discussion for the sake of clarity, focus, and relative brevity. Some details of the discussion will be filled out in the notes. It should be pointed out that the segments of the class session described in the notes include significant teacher input. While these segments are omitted from the running anecdote, a consideration of when and why the teacher explicitly enters the discussion and what kind of comments she introduces would be important in order to fill out an understanding of the conception of learning and the conception of the role of the teacher in this classroom.

Nachman: “I don’t think that this is how the second part of the verse is explaining the first part. I thinkthat the second part of the verse is pointing out that the human being is made in God’s image because—look, a lion killing a lion is different from a person killing a person—both people are made in God’s image, the person who kills and the person who is killed. The verse is saying that people are responsible for their actions.”

The class continues with children discussing their ideas about the second question. This discussion includes as well a consideration of whether there are circumstances under which killing someone is justified (such as if the person tries to kill you or if the person tries to take from you something that is of special value) and also of whether the chumash is saying that it is up to human beings or to God to kill a murderer.21

20 Amram: “See, this is referring to the animals too.”

Yiska: “Yes, that’s why it says ’otam [third person plural: “them”]—it’s talking about human beings and animals.”

Teacher: “Let’s read 1:28-30.”

The children read these three verses, in which God gives the human being dominion over the animals and distinguishes between what human beings are given to eat and what animals are given to eat.

Teacher: “Here (in 1:28) the word ’otam clearly refers only to human beings.”

21 In the course of the discussion, the teacher raises the question of what itmeans when it says in verse 5 that God will seek out the life of the human being and of different possible ways of construing the preposition in the wordba’adam in verse 6: Does this mean by a human being (that is, a human being isto kill the murderer) or for/on account of the human being (that is, on account ofthe fact that a person has been killed, the murderer must be killed, but who is to kill the murderer is left unexpressed in this verse).

Nachman: “I don’t like all this [i.e., the idea that itis the responsibility of human beings to kill a murderer], because if it’s so that one person being killed is bad, then it’s worse if two people are killed.”

Baruch: “I have something that’s similar to what Nachman just said but in response to Elisha [referring to Elisha’s interpretation, offered at the beginning ofthe class, of the relationship between the two parts of9:6]: If a person is in God’s image and so should not be killed, then this is true of the killer, too—so the killer should be punished, but not killed.”

Class discussion continues.22 When the session is over,the teacher gives the children the following homework assignment:

Review chapter 9, verses 1-7.1) Talk with your father or mother about what we discussed in class today.2) According to the way you understand verses 5-6,whose job is it to kill a murderer?

This anecdote can be analyzed in relation to a large number of

important educational issues, including the conception of Torah

learning that is embedded in and expressed in this class,

the relationship between school learning of a subject and the way

people engage in that discipline in the world outside of school, 22 The teacher tells the class that she wants to return to something that Yiska had said earlier, and she introduces the idea that some people have seenin this passage a suggestion that people must set up courts. The teacher relates this idea to the second homework question: When it is a court that kills a murderer, people do not kill the members of the court. The children discuss in what ways courts are different from individuals.

the conception of authenticity of engagement in relation to modes

of study and to particular communities that engage in these

different modes of study, the role of the teacher, the

relationship between a focus on skills and content and a focus on

interpretation, the question of what motivates children to learn,

the interplay between the cognitive and affective aspects

learning, how a classroom culture such as the one here is

cultivated and sustained, and many others. In addition, it is

easy to see at play here the focus on intellectual autonomy and

the understanding of autonomy as a form of responsibility that

was described earlier in relation to the math lesson. And,

looking back at the earlier discussion of self-esteem, it is

worth noting the absolute absence here of the teacher offering

words of praise or of the children looking to the teacher for

approbation of their ideas or praise of their questions. But the

issue on which I want to focus in relation to this anecdote is

the centrality of discourse within this classroom (and school)

community.

Perhaps the first thing that strikes one in reading this anecdote

is that the children are talking to each other. The participation

structure of this classroom is far removed from the mode of

classroom discourse with which most of us are more familiar, with

children sequentially answering questions posed by the teacher

(most often, questions relating to knowledge and comprehension,

not to issues of interpretation), often with a few children

straining to raise their hands as high as possible, perhaps with

an accompanying grunt (“oo, oo”) to let the teacher know that

they should be called on to tell the answer in case the child

whose turn it is to speak fails to do so.

Here, in contrast, a child offers an answer to a question, and

other children address that child directly. The address might

take several forms. A child might challenge or question another

child’s idea because it does not seem to conform to details of

the biblical text. For example, at the beginning of the class,

Amram questions Elisha’s idea that a murderer must be killed

because the person who was killed is made in the image of God by

offering a fact (as he sees it) that appears to undercut this

notion. The accuracy of the information that this child has

brought might then be checked by the children: in this case,

Elisha and the other children turn to the creation story in

chapter one to verify whether only the human being or animals as

well are made in the image of God.

A child might also choose to offer an alternative answer to the

initial question. Here, Nachman does not find Elisha’s initial

interpretation of the verse satisfactory (though note that he has

made the effort to ask Elisha to clarify his interpretation of

the verse). Nachman thinks that the Torah’s comment in this

context that the person was made in the image of God should refer

to both people who are involved in the murder: the killer as well

as the one who is killed. And so Nachman offers a different

understanding of how the fact of the human being’s creation in

God’s image explains why a murderer should be killed.

Or, a child might piggy-back off another child’s comment. For

example, Baruch, toward the end of the anecdote, offers an idea

that relates to what Nachman has just said but through the lens

of Elisha’s initial interpretation of the significance of the

reference to the image of God. Note that Baruch is not only

paying attention to Nachman’s comment and making explicit

reference to it, but he has also held on to Elisha’s comment from

the very beginning of class. He self-consciously presents his new

idea as emerging in his mind from the contributions of his two

classmates.

While I think it is clear that this classroom is characterized by

a deep respect between the children, I want to point out that

this respect is expressed by children taking each other

seriously, not necessarily by children agreeing with each other’s

ideas. Challenging another child, whether based on a question of

fact or based on an evaluation of the cogency of the

interpretation, is as much an expression of respect as is

Baruch’s relating his idea to the ideas of Elisha and Nachman.

Each child has contributed something to the discussion: Yiska by

raising the interpretive questions, Elisha by offering the

initial answer to one of these questions, Amram by challenging

this answer, Nachman by offering an alternative answer, and

Baruch by synthesizing his classmates’ ideas into a new idea that

he offers for consideration. Different children have played

different roles23—another difference between this and a

traditional classroom, in which all children are most often asked

to play the role of answerer of the teacher’s questions—but all

of these roles have interacted together to create a true

community of discourse.

It is worth noting, as well, that the class has focused on

questions that were raised by a child. Yiska had raised two

critical questions about the verse toward the end of the previous

lesson, and these questions were given to the children to

consider for homework and remain at the center of the discussion

for the entire next class meeting. Note, too, that following this

discussion the teacher asks the children to respond for homework

to yet another critical question that has emerged—and also to

discuss together with a parent some of the ideas that have been

23 See Jerome Bruner’s brief discussion of “reciprocity”—or “fitting his efforts into an enterprise”—as a core motivation for learning, and the way in which this entails different people playing different roles within the group, in Toward a Theory of Instruction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 125-127.

raised in class. There is much to say about the focus on

children’s questions and on the interplay between children’s

questions and insights and the expertise and knowledge of the

teacher, the insights of classical commentators, and the

contributions of contemporary scholarship—but these are issues to

which I can’t do justice here. What I do want to point out is

that the teacher has crafted a community of discourse in which

children play a central role but which also explicitly places

children in conversation with the broader community of Torah

learners. By asking the children to discuss the class’s ideas

with their parents, the teacher is communicating that there is a

world of Torah learning and a world of Torah learners, and that

Torah learning is something that binds together people from

different settings, and that takes place within different

settings. Thus, Torah is not just something that we learn in

school or read in shul24; it is something that we engage in with

others across place—and also, as the children begin to look to

the classical commentaries that they have in their chumashim—

across time.25

While many elements of this anecdote are relevant in particular

to Torah learning, the kind of classroom discourse that is

exemplified in this anecdote was characteristic of the entire

school culture at Beit Rabban. The shape of classroom discourse

at Beit Rabban embodied and expressed the central values of the

school and gave the children constant practice in living these

values. The school conceived of the classroom as a laboratory for

crafting a society that was based on respect, and the school

recognized that respect is shown not by agreeing or even by

agreeing to disagree but rather by individuals being willing to

engage one another in discussion and debate within a shared

enterprise of learning and of trying to come to one’s best

understanding. It is the role of the teacher to foster a culture

24 At Beit Rabban, children were taught to read chumash with ta‘amei hamiqra (cantillations or trop); reading from the chumash was always done with chant, and children would read from the Torah before family and friends to mark the beginning of their study of chumash. Though the decision to incorporate traditional chanting into study of chumash was made with several goals in mind, it is worth noting here the ritual dimension of this practice and the way in which this practice linked the children’s experience of Torah study with the world of the synagogue.25

? Children also learn that there are academic scholars of Bible, and they are at times introduced to their work through the teacher bringing in insights from their scholarship or through the class writing a letter to a professor ofBible to ask questions concerning which the scholar might have particular expertise.

of engagement in a shared enterprise and to teach the children

how to interact respectfully and productively with each other

despite differences in background, belief, practice, or ways of

thinking among the members of the classroom community.

School and Society

Each of the anecdotes and discussions above has been offered to

make the claim that social responsibility can best be nurtured in

an institutional setting that is shaped by the very values that

express themselves in a commitment to social action. It is not

enough to engage children in community service activities, though

this engagement is essential both to create a culture of

responsibility to others and to express and inculcate the

commitment to helping others through a regular practice of

service. But if the school at its core is shaped by the very

values relating to achievement, authority, success, and self-

worth that are givens in the dominant culture, and if its modes

of teaching do not foster the ability to approach problems

critically and creatively, then it will not give its students the

powerful tools that are necessary to actively question the givens

of that culture and to seek to create a different kind of

society. Beit Rabban was shaped by the belief that, by teaching

children to recognize and question the givens of the dominant

culture, by creating a school culture that nurtures different

assumptions about self and other, and by educating students in

the qualities of audacity, responsibility, and humility, we can

hope to shape young people who will not only know that it is

their job to change things in the world but who will have the

insight to recognize what needs fixing and the understanding of

how they can begin to go about fixing it.