Rabbi Yona Goodman of the Bnei Akiva Educational Institutions tells Israel National News that the special educational reforms in Israel regarding the matriculation exams are going in the right direction but are problematic due to the nature and speed in which they were implemented.
The reforms, which mean less testing and that subjects like history and the study of Tanakh will be moved from exams to teachers assigning essays to students, are a practical idea, according to Rabbi Goodman. But he explains that they are also problematic because they are making the changes very fast and not trying out the new curriculum as a pilot project to see if it works.
“There is a problem if people only learn for the test and they do some sort of a delete to their mind about the topic they were studying the day after the test. We certainly should be happy that in Israel they're trying different methods, they're rethinking things out and you have about every seven, eight, ten years that you find a vast change, and I think that's good,” he says.
“I think they're starting in the right direction. I think there are vast difficulties. One of them is that they're doing everything very fast instead of having a small pilot and seeing what happened. But I think we all can learn from what's happening in the Board of Education and I don't like everything. We all can learn that we should be constantly checking ourselves in how we're educating our kids at home, how we're educating kids our community, exactly as the Board of Education is after.”
He explains that the solution may be instead creating a bigger problem.
“Number one, it’s done all over the country immediately without any sort of a pilot. Number two, if you want people to learn out of their own initiative, it has to be across the board. As soon as you have to simultaneously learn by yourself, develop by yourself, your teacher will give you a mark wherever the teacher may be and at the same time you have a national objective,” Rabbi Goodman says. “In math or in English people are going to be dedicating themselves only to those and the universities are going to follow up and only check those in order to see if you can be accepted to whatever it is in the university. We need a slower deeper process.”
“But again, it’s wonderful that we're constantly rechecking ourselves,” he adds. “We want to be a startup nation, not only in technology. We want to be a startup nation in education.”
There is also a big difference between 20 years ago and today with access to information.
Rabbi Goodman explains that the education system should be placing more emphasis on personal development.
“I don't want to know what you're going to be doing next year… I want to know what sort of a person you’re doing to be,” he says. “I’m talking about an educational system which should be emphasizing much more helping you to develop, not even as a Jew, as a human being and afterwards as a Jew and afterwards hopefully as a believing Jew. We say the knowledge is there, let's teach them how to find the knowledge. The knowledge is there, that's good. Let's learn how to use it, how to look for it, but how to be a person who is the person who's holding this knowledge in his hand or in his pocket. I think we need to realize throughout 120 years of life that what is important no less than what's written on our CV is what is going to be said, not because it's going to be said but because that's life. Life is the way we are relating to those around us, to our country, to our land, to our people.”