The last line of defence?
MY daughter attends prep at a government school with a large Jewish population. I would hazard a guess that it probably has one of the largest Jewish populations -— 40 per cent of the total — of any public primary school.
For reasons presumably both cultural and geographic, Jews tend to cluster even within the state education system. And when Jews become a critical mass, interesting things can happen -— something those involved in shaping the future of Jewish education ought to carefully consider.
About seven years ago, a group of parents at the school set up a Hebrew immersion program in response to demand. It was operated by qualified teachers for 50 minutes three mornings a week before school at a modest fee of $210 a term.
This year, about 65 students from a total Jewish population of 150 have enrolled and as you might expect, the program attracts more Jewish kids to the school. Another 65 children also attend after-school programs run by the United Jewish Education Board (UJEB), with many children involved in both the UJEB and the Hebrew programs.
This is not as I had earlier assumed an isolated case of parents tailoring state education to fit the high premium they place on Jewish studies and Hebrew. A friend tells me her daughter’s public school in Sydney actually offers Hebrew as one of its foreign language options in response to similar lobbying from Jewish parents.
Do either of these communities sound like welfare cases, needing UJEB (or Sydney’s Academy BJE) to provide what president Judith Perlstein recently referred to in The AJN (19/06) as “the last line of defence” in Jewish education?
Would you assume these children were in grave danger of slipping through the Jewish net and into the abyss of “assimilation and intermarriage”?
The answer is clearly no. The parents’ commitment to Jewish education speaks for itself. They need innovative ideas on how to deliver this education to their kids, but the product they’re chasing is not “last-line,” it’s top-shelf.
Let’s be clear. UJEB is a vitally important organisation that should receive a far greater share of communal funds to help educate kids in ¬≠non-Jewish schools.
My criticism relates mainly to its public rhetoric; as I’ve opined in the past, UJEB tends to exhibit condescending pity, at times verging on contempt, for its client base. “Without UJEB”, writes Perlstein, in support of her case for more money, “many of our students would not receive any Jewish education”.
And yet, there’s an inherent contradiction in this discussion because Perlstein also asserts -— whether rightly or otherwise is a topic for another day —- that the main reason most Jewish children don’t attend Jewish day schools is the cost.
This suggests most parents outside day schools would still prefer to send their kids there. Do we honestly believe these same parents would leave their kids bereft of any Jewish education in the absence of UJEB?
I suspect UJEB, itself, doesn’t, and that its stance can be understood, at least in part, as a reflection of the unwritten rules of debate about Jewish education. Put simply: the Jewish day schools must reign supreme and any attempt to challenge this paradigm won’t be tolerated.
So powerful is this dynamic that UJEB, somewhat absurdly, even defines its own success in terms of losing clients to the Jewish sector! “At the same time, we are doing all that we can to bring students into the Jewish day schools, or return them to the schools they have left,” writes Perlstein.
Despite UJEB’s efforts, the shift away from day schools continues. As Perlstein states, this year alone has seen a 15 per cent increase in UJEB’s enrolments as the financial crisis and rising day school fees strengthen the drift toward public schools.
It’s surely time to align the rhetoric with the reality and find workable solutions without peddling unfair and outdated assumptions about the priorities of families outside the day school system. I won’t pretend the proactive approach to Jewish education that has defined my school community or that of my Sydney friend is the norm, but it’s possibly a sign of things to come. As their market power increases, parents outside the day schools might well become more assertive consumers of Jewish education.
An organisation like UJEB should be free to pursue excellence as its goal and even embrace a little healthy competition. It need not promote itself as an alternative to Jewish education. But it shouldn’t have to wish itself out of existence either, even if only to avoid the prospect of being left behind.
Julie Szego is a writer for The Age.