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Impotence in the education system By Stef Wertheimer Tags: education, Israel The director of the Prime Minister's Office, Raanan Dinur, has embarked on a campaign to increase the budgets for education and defense. I wholeheartedly support bolstering education, and am in favor of the idea of setting up a national council modeled after Ireland's National Economic and Social Council, which would determine the State of Israel's educational goals for the next generation. Finance Minister Roni Bar-On, whom I hold in great esteem, must understand that several parties in the economy need to be involved in the thought process behind the way the state's resources are allocated. However, a moment before the confrontation over prestige between the Prime Minister's Office and the treasury will reach a boiling point, I recommend that we stop and ask: Why exactly do we want to increase the budgetsr - in this case the budget for education? What is the plan? Who is at the helm and does he have the power necessary to implement it? There is no need for great expertise in the field of education to recognize that education in Israel is being conducted without central direction and devoid of an attempt to reach predefined goals. Recently I participated in a meeting with the senior command staff of a branch of the Israel Defense Forces. They sought to cooperate on establishing a technical school to prepare a technical cadre for that IDF branch. One of the colonels at the conference thought the faculty of such a school should be very sensitive to the needs of the pupils. "When you want to take children from difficult backgrounds," he said, "the teachers must be aware of their home and family lives and of the child's emotional state." Advertisement Based on my familiarity with the pupils at a school I set up in the Lavon Industrial Park, this seems to me to be an important subject. We were all in agreement that in order to provide a child with a good chance to become a professional, to join the army and to become part of society, he or she should be provided with professional educational support, directed at his or her emotional and personal needs. Nonetheless, I felt that something in this discussion was fundamentally mistaken. Why should I, an industrialist whose purpose is to manufacture and export, discuss educational issues with the commander of a military branch, whose role is to protect the country? True, we both desperately need a good training system for professionals - but this is the central function of the educational system. How can it be that those in charge of education, who have available to them the national budget's second largest allocation after defense, shirk responsibility for educational issues of primary significance? Imagine if you were to discover that various IDF branches do not communicate with each other. This is the reality in the educational system: committees with self-interests unrelated doctrines, school principals who have given up on receiving any consideration from hundreds of supervisors and officials. And then those at the top gather to discuss how we can foster unity among the people through a core program and shared values. This is not an important question. In my view, every sector can decide how much Torah it wants to learn, in which language, and how. Education, in terms of values, can and should be pluralistic. Unity needs to find expression elsewhere, in a much more practical way - in a program that would ensure the stability, the strength and the existence of the State of Israel; a program that would ensure that each pupil would have a future of dignity and a good livelihood. The education system needs to evaluate how it can assist each child - whether Bedouin, ultra-Orthodox, Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Ethiopian, secular or religious - to live a life of dignity in adulthood. This is the obligation of the educational system, and it should be approached with professionalism: with planning, evaluation of needs, by establishing goals, and through implementation. I accuse the current education minister of idleness, yet I do not think that the minister who preceded her was any better, just like I am not so naive as to think that replacing the political leadership will solve the problem of impotence in the education system. The solution lies in the establishment of an educational administration, which would include elements outside the Education Ministry, such as the Defense Ministry, the Ministry of Industry and Trade, and non-ministerial, external civilian elements. The two central educational issues that need to be addressed by such an administration are the interests of the state and the interests of the child. If the existing system is unable to provide most of the solutions for most of the children, and if the extent to which it serves the needs of the nation and of society are unclear - it must not be allowed to continue functioning. Professional education -- technical and vocational -- which the educational system has sought to destroy, needs to be part of the package of solutions. I recently received the interim report of the Knesset Research Department on professional education. It includes a survey of the state of professional education in various countries. While Israel's productive and exporting infrastructure is being cut, and there is scorn for those who choose technical education over academic studies, in the developed world quality professional education receives significant support. The result: in Singapore 72 percent of the pupils turn to professional education, in Switzerland 69 percent do so, in Norway 55 percent, in Finland 39 percent, in the Netherlands 69 percent, in Germany 60 percent, and in South Korea 30 percent, etc. In Israel, 30 years ago, professional education amounted to 50 percent of all education. Today, it no longer exists. If, on the occasion of the state's 60th anniversary, we do not seriously deal with the issue of work and production, the problems we will soon have to deal with will not be at the level of values only - but also at the existential level. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Undressed to impress Yeshiva student strips in a supermarket to protest sale of chametz during Passover. Ante up Hamas offers truce in return for a Palestinian state along Israel's pre-1967 borders.   1.   And do parents have a say? 05:06  |  marilyn 21/04/08   2.   Marilyn (#1) 16:13  |  Smith 21/04/08   3.   O n e education for all. 19:28  |  H.H.M 21/04/08   4.   O n e education for all. 19:29  |  H.H.M 21/04/08

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