Naftali Bennett is my favorite Education Minster not only because he's Naftali et cetera, but also he's not Shai Piron, which is a blessing by itself.
Likewise, he's in hi-tech and did five points in math (take a bow) and today he said: "We are Jews, it's not enough to be just the start-up nation, but we must also be the nation of the Bible," and he came out really annoyingly religious. Only what? He's quite right, may we have no part in it.
My intent isn't to equate mathematics to the Bible; because the day I stop idolizing mathematics and those who study it is the day I say, "gender studies are important." There is also no need to equate them, both are important. Rather, while everyone is already studying math, at this level or that, the Bible hasn't been taught for a while, and in my opinion two generations have already missed the opportunity to read it.
Even without trying to understand it, they're just not capable of even reading the Bible. In my opinion, it's because that’s when the educational system stopped teaching the [diacritic vowels]. You can't know Hebrew and you can't read the Bible without knowing what all this filth is above, below, and inside the letters.
Mathematics is the basis of everything universal. The Bible is the basis of everything which is Jewish; and the truth is, the Bible underlies more or less the whole of human history, since it produced Christianity and Islam. The Bible is the cultural and religious DNA of most of humanity, at least until the Chinese and the Indians eat us all. As a secular I'll add: it's also a great piece of literature, and a timeless wonder. And in Israel, for years we don't even know how to read the Bible.
I know how to read the Bible, because the members of my generation learned the right way from second grade, and in high school I had a teacher that I'll remember to the end of time.
I got a little bit of rabbinic tradition in middle school, so I have a little bit of a childish perspective, which is to say I'm just about a total ignoramus regarding everything connected to Judaism. I don't know which direction to open a siddur (Jewish prayer book); I don't know what Gemara is or what Talmud is, and maybe they're the same thing. Philosophers over the entire course of history have discussed Maimonides, but only in college did I notice that we're talking about our Rambam. The generations which came after me learned even less.
But it's more important to nitpick the new civics textbook, and to conduct endless discussions whether Israel is a Jewish democratic, or a democratic Jewish country. This is easier than studying vowels.