A new junior high school pilot program will place two teachers in the classroom this September for heart-to-heart talks when budding teenagers return to school.
The "New Horizon" program will begin in 50 public junior high school classrooms, according to the Education Ministry.
Ministry Pedagogic Administration director Leah Rozenberg said the "New Horizon" reforms that span the educational spectrum are being implemented in a total of 763 schools, including 313 schools which already started the program a year ago.
As part of the "New Horizon" initiative, teachers work with students in small groups, which allows for more personal contact, which the ministry believes will facilitate closer relationships between students, teachers and parents.
Rozenberg said in a statement last month that the Education Ministry views students and parents as consumers who participate in a "relationship that should be one of partnership and open dialogue."
In the junior high school component, the project will include a "personal education" program for seventh graders, which calls for two teachers to hold an hour-long educational conversation with students four times a week.
New Study Supports Personal Attention, Focus on Values
The program dovetails with a study published this summer by researchers at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem that found that children's values help determine whether they will participate in violent behavior at school.
The study, funded by the German-Israeli Foundation for Research and Development, was published in the July issue of the respected academic journal, Child Development and examined the issue of values (defined as "abstract goals serving as guiding life principles") as a predictor of adolescent violent behavior in school environments.
Dr. Ariel Knafo and Ella Daniel from the Department of Psychology, and Dr. Mona Khoury-Kassabri from the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work, surveyed 907 Jewish and Arab adolescents at 33 Israeli high schools in grades 10 to 12, using self-report forms.
The findings of the study indicated that school program can exert a much greater influence in preventing violent behavior than one might think. Even though home values shape a young person's beliefs, nonetheless programs that stress tolerance for others and other universal values do help to reduce and even prevent violent behavior in schools.