The crisis of Israeli education is due to libertarianism. The teachers’ low pay certainly drives some of the best cadres away from education, but that is not the major problem: the best teachers rarely find high-paid jobs in the commercial sector, anyway. Rather, universal disrespect to teachers is the problem. Children are taught to disrespect teachers: ignore them when they enter the class, call them by name instead of title, and generally behave familiarly toward the teachers. Parents join the subversion of teachers’ prestige: they criticize teachers with their children present, defend children in disputes with teachers, and even demand sanctions against school principals.
Corruption adds to the problem: the Ministry of Education changes textbooks almost every year to provide publishers with windfall profits, but teachers don’t have enough time to familiarize themselves with new books. Ever changing political course also substantially changes the subject. Socialist nihilism allows inducting the teachers with mere three years of professional courses instead of university degree; such teachers usually lack erudition.
The solution to Israeli education problem requires several steps. First, return to the world’s best education, proved by twenty-three centuries of unparalleled success: Jewish religious education from the age of three or five, including reading, massive memorizing, and various types of analysis. Second, divest from at least half of the teachers and bring the best teachers from India, Russia, and other low-wage countries. Three, reduce the school time to reasonable; twelve-year general education is absurd. Four, increase the teachers pay by 30-35% to the society’s average. Five, mandate the show of respect to teachers.
Yes, but who would educate the parents?
Any form of rigid education would be useless as long as the parents fight the system.
Besides, a state whose officials are criminals at best, cannot really set education standards, or an education program.
(10:00-12:00 "How to embezzle taxpayers' money, with the current Finance minister")
I agree that quality education is the most important issue for the survival and success of Jewish people. However I disagree that calling teachers by first name and generally familiarly behavior is a problem.
In Americas best universities, including Harvard, MIT, Yale, etc which together account for 50% of all Nobel prices in the WORLD, students are calling their professors by first name and are "familiar" with them. Being friendly and familiarly does not necessarily mean lack of respect.
The respect must be earned by the teachers.
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Here is the real problem is that very few people have thought about: Great teachers, just like great musicians, or poets are not produced in universities. They are born! However, just like great poets, truly great teachers are 1 in 1 in 10,000, or ever less!
What to do about that? With all due respect for our national past, going back to the past is not a solution for the future. I do agree with the value of starting education very early: It is important to develop creative, critical, logical thinking at very early age. IT is important to support inquiry against the rigidity of dogmatism.
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Modern solution should be created by getting together a team of the most brilliant educators (the top 1 per million) and especially the most top genius educators in mathematics (and later science.) Also get the team of the most brilliant creative computer programmers, and together invent computer programs that will address kid's progress individually.
A very simple, example is that today kid can learn touch typing within just 2 weeks using good typing programs. In the past such achievement required at least a 6 month course and a lot of teacher time.
Of course it will take much more work to create
extremely attractive, addictive children programs for development of 2 and 3 dimensional spacial thinking, linear and non-linear logical problems solving, pattern discovery and pattern recognitions. Math and science program will expand the kids imagination beyond anything possible for adults, and we will have millions of super creative and intelligent young people and thousands of world class geniuses.
Of course computer technology can be also used to learn foreign languages, history, geography, and other skills.
Kids love playing computer games, and only the very best teachers can compete with such programs.
Programs and computers are very cheap, compared to teachers.
With this approach, within short time we will have genius kids sitting at their computer, directing the little nano-tech bees, with tiny cameras for eyes, and most painful stingers. They will direct them into Ahmedinajad's pants and sting him in his private part every time he mention "death to Israel". That will teach him the lesson! With such treatment he will soon forget about his Allah, and will start prising Israel!
Liberalism is not the same as Libertarianism.
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Ayn Rand was probably a Libertarian. It stands for minimal government, just enough to level the playing field. For instance, Libertarians would not make compulsory seat belt laws.
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Women's Lib is liberalism. It generally means much government intervention & control to enforce that everyone should be equal. Liberals are the types who would make the wearing of seat belts compulsory.
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In any case, I am not sure that there is a crisis in education. Disrespect of someone not worthy of respect might be a good thing. The most important element in education is cultivation of an inquiring mind. Respectful students aren't so good at creative tasks.
Are you sure you are writing about Israel and not the U.S.?
Some comments:
"bring the best teachers from India, Russia, and other low-wage countries" — you must be joking. Israeli kids are native Hebrew speakers - how is an Indian teacher who speaks no Hebrew and ENglish only with a thick accent going to explain math to my kid?? I am American born and I always have a hard time understanding Indians when they speak English - try doing that with a 9 year old kid who is having trouble with his math and is NOT a native English speaker.
ALSO - you missed the main problem - most of the HUGE education budget (per capita, I think we spend more than most Western countries) is eaten up by the beauracracy and apparchnicks. The SOLUTION - mandate by LAW a minimum percentage of the education budget that must get spent IN THE CLASSROOM.
Fire all of the unecessary beauracrats and dead weight - their salaries are OUTRAGEOUS - often 5-10 times the wage of teachers (it is ironic how large the wage differentials are in the "socialist" public sector). Some of these salaries go up to 30-40,000 NIS a month !!!
Get rid of bloated budgetary pensions which are often 2-3 times the average national salary- THAT'S where the education budget is going !!!
Increase competition between schools - for example, using a vouchers system.
Get rid of tenure.
Some additional comments:
The problem is less accute in the religious schools, because many competent religious adults are willing to work for low wages because they "believe" in the value of "hinuch" (i.e. ideology plays a role). If I were spending 60% of my salary in taxes and stuck with the secular school system, I'd be VERY angry.
PS - your good buddy Olmert has been transfering $$$$$ away from religious zionist schools and to Arab schools and anti-zionist haredi schools associated with parties that support Olmert's coalition.
One problem is that Israeli pupils don't know English, as they should. So it's better for them to learn math with thick Indian accent than from a fluent Hebrew speaker who is unable to teach cows to milk.
Kids, actually, have much less problem getting used to accents than adults.
I never saw figures, how much is spent for administrative purposes. I'm not sure if the proportion is really huge, though it's possible.
About Olmert, the only point is that others are still worse than him.
Anonymous:
Too bad you didn't sign your comment with some kind of name.
I agree about the bloated bureaucracy. That goes for more than just the Education ministry.
Also agree about the teachers, even though I think children have an easier time getting used to different accents, just like they can learn new languages faster than adults (Well, except for the stupid kids).
But, as kids, they will relate more to someone 'like them' than an outsider. They will be quick to ridicule foreign teachers.
Also, it so happens that Obadiah isn't really supporting Olmert, except when he explains why he is not as bad as the other candidates. Personally, I think they are all traitors at best.
I happened to have several foreign lecturers in the university, and hardly they were despised as outsiders.
But Danny, I was talking about kids.
I hope your university didn't have kids in it
(I'm talking about the 8 year old kind. Not the 20 year old kind)
Again I say:
Great teachers, just like great potes, are born, not made in universities.
We must find a way for each great teacher to teach 1000 or even 10,000 kids.
Of course I meant "poets"…
I do not use my real name because I am not in Kansas anymore, and I do not think I enjoy First Amendment protection for my speech. Of course, if I were inciting Syria to attack us …
BACK TO TOPIC - I am no xenophobic, and have nothing wrong with foreigners - on a PRACTICAL level, I think it is STUPID to have Israeli kids learn MATH in a foreign language - this will force kids to spend 30% of their brainpower translating when they should be spending 100% of their brainpower on MATH !!!
I am in favor of much more English in Israeli schools (even though most of Israeli's gov't officials are twits who do not know basic English) but I do not think that "Math Hour" is the time to be working on your English.
In addition, the English the kids would learn from Indian teachers would NOT be the "king's English" but would most likely be replete with grammatical errors, etc. I am not sure that frontal exposure to English speaker's whose English is weak is the best way to improve one's English.
As for the apparachniks eating up Israel's education budget, to be fair the evidence I have in hand AT THIS TIME is:
a) I read that Israel is ranked ahead of many countries in educational budget per capita (I remember in the early 1990's Rabin bragged that he increased the education budget to exceed the defense budget);
b) our teacher salaries are low;
c) average class size is HUGE - I don't care HOW good the teacher is, if there are 40 kids in the class ….
d) anecdotal evidence (my wife is an educator) about the WASTE in the Education Ministry - in 2005, Ronit Tirosh (now an MK from the Kadima Krooks, then a senior level official) sued the State of Israel for a $1 million pension !!!! How many successful businesspeople get a $1 million pension after 20-25 years of work in Israel !!! (or in America for that matter).
And this is from the public till …
When I said $1 million pension, I was referring to the total value of the pension - her law suit was for 4.5 million NIS which at the time was worth $1 million - at today's exchange rate, that would be something like $1.2 million.
Anonymous:
I didn't say that you should use your real name, just some kind of nickname so it will be easier to relate back to you.
As for what you wrote: I'll take your word about the budget size, but isn't it true that Israel is behind most modern countries in the quality of education? So are you saying most of this budget is simply spent poorly?
Ray — All Nobel Prizes are not the same. I guess you have in mind Chemistry, Medicine, Physics, rather than the "Peace" prize.
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If we only used "great" teachers, 98% of schools would have to be closed.
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Great practitioners are often not the best teachers, Mozart and Beethoven for example. One can learn the basics of classical guitar from a competent teacher and be prepared for master classes with a Segovia or Bream. Same for any subject. One does not need to study with Bertrand Russell to learn algebra. The concern with "teaching children to think", rather than to learn the basics is usually just an institutionalized excuse for teachers that do not even know the basics.
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I agree with you about computer learning — far better to have a good computer program than an incompetent teacher.
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anonymous — I agree that teachers should be getting the money instead of bureaucrats. And, ideally, kids should have teachers from similar backgrounds. But, mathematics in particular is a "universal language". And Indians, like the Chinese, are exceptionally good at learning languages, even if with an accent, and I think that would extend to Hebrew if they had a reason to learn it. They are (both) also very good at math, physics, chemistry, et cetera.
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Back to Ray — The reason that the Indians and Chinese are so good at learning and teaching the sciences, even if not at making great innovations in them, is because of the traditions in their cultures of "rote memorization" which is so despised by modern, western, (incompetent) teachers unions. The Chinese especially HAVE to exercise their memories just to learn the thousands of ideograms with which their language is written. This capability is extended to memorizing the "basics" of the sciences. This form of learning was also the norm in the west at the time of its greatest mental and social advancement. Until the early 1900s, the Brits assumed that any educated person could read Greek and Latin (as well as speak French fluently). But, of course, that collapsed with compulsary universal education. If every idiot's child has to be given a degree, obviously the quality of education will suffer. The Jews of Israel do not have the problem of racial variations in intelligence that America and the Brits suffer from however, so a higher standard could and should be expected.
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As for calling teachers by their first names, I generally disapprove, but that is how the west has devolved. Out having a beer with your teacher, you might call him "Bill", but in the dojo, he should be called "Sensei".
Full disclosure - I went to an Ivy League university and studied physics. We *ALWAYS* complained about the "Chinese TA" (teaching assistant) who:
a) was a very nice guy;
b) understood his stuff;
c) had HORRIBLE communication skills.
If a class full of serious physics majors (aged 16-23) could not understand the CHinese TA (truly - we couldn't understand a word those guys ever said - it was the accent, but it was more than that), TRUST ME, the class of elementary school kids, many of whom do not have talent for math, will have trouble with the Chinese Teachers.
Teaching math properly requires charisma and dramatic flair for getting the kids involved. Communication skills are NO LESS important than math skills. Communication skills are language oriented but they are also culture oriented.
anonymous — Very good point, but I think the problem could be mitigated by insisting that anyone hired to teach was required to be fluent in the language in which the course is taught. The younger the students, the higher the level of communication skills that should be required. I have had native English speakers as professors in the sciences that were very, very qualified as to their knowledge of the subjects and who had great and original insights, but could not explain anything. Like I said, the best practitioners are not always the best teachers of the subjects. There is a balance to be sought. It is as much a mistake to assume that someone who really knows the subject would be a good teacher as it is to assume that someone with great communication skills can teach any subject. Balance — with a weighting in favor of communication the younger the student.
anonymous — And while getting students involved is a good thing, much of the problem is assuming everyone should learn the "subject of the day". Everyone is not cut out to be a physicist or computer programmer. Some people are just naturally, by inclination and intelligence level, farmers, or cooks, or dry-cleaners, or manual laborers. That is the biggest problem with compulsary universal education. In the US, we are turning out thousands of very qualified computer programmers every year, but Bill Gates insists that the government grant more work visas for Indians and Chinese because they will work for a tenth (or less) of what an American (or Israeli) would have to be paid just to pay back their student loans.
Anonymous:
The reason that nobody understands the Chinese is that they're not really using words. They are simply mumbling so we will think they use verbal communications.
All Chinese communicate telepathically through the hive mind.
Very true words. What happens is that these people are usually at odds with the system, and end up becoming criminals, or eternally resentful of the establishment (Which they see as a bully that tried to force itself upon them), and educated people (Which they hate for getting ahead of them).
Then again, a society can always use more soldiers. I say send the stupid ones for military psychic conditioning from third grade. Let it make useful citizens out of potential welfare receiving, wife beating, equally worthless child spawning, dangerously violent people.
That last one was just wishful thinking. Not mixing them with children who are actually capable of learning can be a good step in the right direction though.
True about Chinese (not all of them), but it's different with Brahman Indians, from my experience.