Last update - 02:37 06/02/2009
Educating a new leadership
By Ariel Beery
The same question has arisen in many recent conversations I have held with my peers in their 20s and 30s: When will Israel have its own Barack Obama, a candidate who, regardless of his future performance, has already profoundly inspired society? It's a natural question. The historic election of a fresh and charismatic American leader stands in stark contrast to the Israeli electoral line-up, which includes two prime ministerial candidates who are themselves former premiers whom many thought were relegated to history long ago.
The disappointment only deepens when one realizes that there are few young leaders rising in the ranks to replace the old horses - few obvious candidates who seem to offer the promise of new leadership in the coming decade, other than the odd general who enters politics straight after the military.
This leadership void poses a systemic challenge, which has weakened Israel in past decades and will worsen as time passes and faith in the political establishment diminishes. As the Israel Democracy Institute's 2008 Democracy Index found, trust in our elected Knesset representatives dropped to 29 percent - whereas 71 percent of the public trust our unelected army generals. To reverse this trend and to grow a crop of new leaders, Israel will have to go beyond the Israel Defense Forces' officers training course, to locate individuals able to lead in a world of grassroots movements and fast-moving companies, where creativity and entrepreneurial drive are valued more than obeying orders and strict hierarchies.
Under the circumstances, it might be useful to examine one key reason why the U.S. is able to produce social and political leaders who can handle the complex requirements of public life: a liberal arts education.
Israel's university system is based on the German model, developed to meet the needs of an industrial economy. To fulfill this system's requirements for specialized labor, students choose their discipline early, and stick to it during their studies. A student studying law, for example, is trained solely as a lawyer - and will not be exposed to, say, computer science or theology. Students are chosen entirely on the basis of their grades and test scores, regardless of extracurricular activities.
The American system follows a different ideal - and evolved in a dissimilar manner. American students generally apply to colleges rather than particular faculties, and are judged by several standards - grades being only one criterion in the admissions process. Students then have up to two years to decide on their "major." Only then do they specialize in a field.
This system has proven especially adept at preparing individuals for the information age, which demands creativity and nonlinear problem-solving skills, so they can develop new ideas and open up new possibilities. Contrary to Israeli start-ups, which are the product of enormous specialized expertise, American businesses are often of a more robust nature, because the people behind them have a more diverse set of skills, due to their educational backgrounds.
In the Israeli system, programs in art and technology in institutions like the Academic College of Netanya are denied certification from the Council on Higher Education, because their offerings are too multidisciplinary, as the founding dean of the college's School of Art and Multimedia Design, Prof. Mel Alexenberg, told me recently. Moreover, as Tova Serkin, former executive director of the Jewish activist network KolDor explained to me, the monodisciplinary approach hurts not only the political sector, but the nonprofit one, too, since the leaders of the latter are not suitably prepared to handle the complex requirements of having to supply vision while simultaneously supervising budgets - in other words, of seeing both the big and the small pictures.
In contrast, look at Barack Obama, who completed his undergraduate studies at Columbia University, studying a core curriculum that exposes students to various streams of thought and history. He then went on to attend law school, his experiences in the arts and sciences in hand, endowed with a complex and informed worldview that shows in his ability to discuss policy and envision a future for the United States.
In Israel, the generals who rise up through the political ranks cannot envision a future beyond two years - oftentimes because of the security lens through which they were trained to look at the world.
Some might say a liberal arts education cannot work in Israel, because of the delay caused by compulsory military service. From personal experience, I believe this is a feeble excuse. I finished my IDF service, and have since completed both undergraduate and graduate degrees, and I am not yet 30. And generally, Israelis, just as Americans, are prolonging their youth - being 24 today is not like being 24 a decade ago, as individuals nowadays often start family life after they are well into their 30s.
Until Israel diversifies its higher education system - and moves beyond the German model - the best and only school for leadership will remain the IDF, an institution not known for its democratic structure or multidisciplinary approach. A society begets the leaders it grows - and if our next government hopes to create a better future for our country, reforming the educational system should top its agenda. Such reforms should include incentives that would allow for the blossoming of many small colleges that would offer multidisciplinary curricula. Only individuals with broad worldviews can build a system to replace the broken one that turns over governments every couple of years; only then will we be able to produce leaders who can tackle both the economy and the law, as opposed to heads of state whose primary education is tactical warfare.
Ariel Beery is the co-director and CEO of the PresenTense Group, which equips social entrepreneurs and communities for the 21st century.