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.