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.
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