Wake up, community leaders: you can get a good Jewish education in a state school

JULIE SZEGO: With its insular focus on Jewish day schools that sees the public system as a ‘problem’, the recent Victorian discussion paper is doing families a disservice 

FOR AT LEAST 18 months, a group of respected and influential figures in Victoria’s Jewish community have been beavering away at the Jewish Schools Project, a plan to tackle what they say is a looming crisis in Jewish education. The first instalment of that plan is a just-released discussion paper that spells out the crisis and flags four possible solutions.

The headline warning: a combination of “powerful demographic, cultural and financial forces”— the latter being increasingly prohibitive tuition fees — is threatening the viability of Melbourne’s big four Jewish day schools: Bialik College, King David School, Leibler Yavneh College and Mount Scopus Memorial College.

“The proportion of Jewish children in Jewish schools is falling, as more families choose to send their children elsewhere,” the paper warns. “Elsewhere” being government schools. The paper describes this trend of families sending their kids to government schools as a “problem”, in a tone that carries more than a whiff of moral judgment.

It claims the Jewish Schools Project claims is about “making high-quality Jewish education accessible to more Jewish children in Victoria”. Clearly, the paper’s authors believe “high quality Jewish education” is indivisible from Jewish day schools — a position as insular as it is strange, given the context.

Before I explain that strangeness, a declaration. I’m among those parents sending their children “elsewhere,” in this instance, to Glen Eira College, one of several public high schools with a large concentration of Jewish kids. So many Jewish students attend Glen Eira that the school was persuaded, after one parent’s tireless campaigning, to offer Hebrew, alongside French and Japanese, as language choices.

The Hebrew classes are run with the help of the United Jewish Education Board (UJEB), a Victorian organisation that provides Jewish educational programs to the 40 per cent of the community’s children who, as the discussion paper puts it, “find themselves outside the Jewish schools”. (Note the implication of accident rather than design.)

As I’ve written before, UJEB rolls out engaging and creative programs: a year-long batmitzvah program, camps, Israel study tours, activities marking Jewish festivals, Hebrew language classes in various government school settings.

So here’s the strange bit I alluded to earlier. UJEB, according to the paper, “is a key stakeholder” in the discussion. Indeed, in an interview with The Jewish Independent in April, Daniel Aghion, the new head of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, the communal roof body that is assisting the Jewish Schools Project, told me one of the proposals in the mix was “expanding the UJEB-type offering so that kids can go where they want but there’s a bigger offering of Jewish education outside schools”.

But the UJEB proposal does not appear among the solutions — various forms of merger and co-operation between the big four — that are canvassed in the paper. Maybe it was naive to think it would be. What is truly astonishing, however, is that despite UJEB being named as a “key stakeholder” the paper makes no mention whatsoever, not even in passing, about the desirability of beefing up its funding to reflect the reality that 40 per cent of Jewish children in Victoria “find themselves” not in Jewish schools.

Now, even for a public school parent, I must admit my zealotry is unusual. In my view, no progressive agenda is worth the recycled paper it’s written on if it doesn’t rest on the supremacy of an all-in, world-class public education system.

I won’t pretend every family attending government schools shares my zealotry; for many, public education is simply the affordable option having sensibly decided they’re not prepared to forego home ownership or 12 years of family holidays to pay for Bialik et al.

Still, I’ve found over the years that regardless of what brought families to public schools, once there, many find themselves pleasantly surprised at the experience, so much so they relinquish any “grass is greener” anxieties.

We’d be here forever if I was to list the attributes, from the emotional intelligence children gain from sitting in classrooms that better reflect the society they live in, to a greater sense of independence in their learning that serves them well at university. (In other words, no spoon feeding.)

What is also clear, and what the discussion paper evidently finds intolerable, is that Jewish families are drawn to public schools with big Jewish populations because they think it helps to preserve Jewish identity. Far from walking away from Jewishness, they simply believe a meaningful expression of it can be found outside the Jewish day schools. 

As far as the paper’s authors are concerned, that mindset is a “problem,” one that’s most “acute” in the primary years when families can choose “low-cost, high-quality” government schools with high concentrations of Jewish children, with many deciding to stay in the government system for high school.

If the current trend continues, the paper says, the proportion of Victorian Jewish children attending government schools will increase to 51 per cent in primary, and 31 per cent in secondary over the next decade.

The shift towards state schooling creates a “vicious” circle, the paper says: the more that Jewish kids go to government schools, the more attractive these “low cost” public schools become for more Jewish families, and the greater the cost pressures on Jewish schools now confronting falling or stagnant enrolments.

I could write a thesis on the casual elitism permeating the document. Why, for instance, the persistent references to “low cost” government schooling? That’s the whole point, and beauty, of universal public education — it’s public! Why the constant references to “high-quality” government schools other than to imply there’s another kind? (That private schools deliver value for exorbitant money seems a given.)

As for the passing reference to the Jewish schools as “non-selective,” we’re in absurdist territory now. No school charging upwards of $34,000 a year can be described as “non-selective”.

I’m also somewhat baffled by the strategic logic of seeking to lure back or keep families in Jewish education while basically talking down to them.

But mainly, I’m struck at the authors’ tactical error in refusing any concessions to reality, refusing even the smallest gesture towards meeting people where they are and respecting the integrity of their choices, refusing to set aside vested interests enough to acknowledge the mere existence of a positive case for Jewish education outside the Jewish day schools.

It’s an error for this reason: while the authors seek to delineate what they see as the legitimate boundaries in this conversation, the community has other ideas. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the paper has sparked intense discussion on Facebook about whether Jewish schools are worth it at all, whether overall they turn out committed Jews or instead “Jew’ed” out graduates for whom overfamiliarity has bred contempt, and whether the community would be better served building “Jewish schools” in the state system, starting with Glen Eira.

The paper’s authors say it’s time to “pursue this conversation with open minds”. Some might say: careful what you wish for.

Illustration: John Kron