Published: 11 November 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
She demurred. “Actually, I’ve spent most of my working life in Catholic schools. There’s always a saint’s day and it’s very much like this.”
I recalled this conversation when, in the course of my day job at Australian Catholic University, I came across the Enhancing Catholic School Identity Project (ECSI).
Catholic schools have a great deal in common with Jewish schools and not just on silly days. Both sectors struggle to inspire a new generation with attachment to old traditions, to create a sense of community that is inclusive yet true to particularist values, and to build bridges between the disparate life experiences of families and the demands of religious law, custom and culture.
But they have resources we don’t. There about 10,000 students at Jewish schools in Australia and about 750,000 at Catholic schools. The Catholic sector services 20% of Australian school students and is supported by two universities with dedicated research and teacher training. So maybe we can learn something.
ECSI, developed jointly by Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium and the Catholic Education Commission of Victoria, enables Catholic schools to understand their own ideological positions and adapt their religious pedagogy to achieve the outcomes their school community wants.
Obviously, it doesn’t measure lots of the things that matter to us: mitzvah observance, knowledge of history, Hebrew language or attachment to Israel. It also comes from a different starting point: whereas Jewish schools tend to have an overdeveloped sense of their ideological particularity in comparison to one another, Catholic schools have traditionally maintained an illusion that they sing from the same song sheet.
But the more I listened to Associate Professor Robyn Horner, a researcher who trains schools to apply the system, the more I found myself nodding and thinking of Jewish schools.
ECSI is based on three scales which measure attitudes to identity, belief and teaching style through questionnaires given to teachers, parents and students.
The identity scale has the most resonance for Jewish education. It measures how schools respond to the challenges of modernity, creating a spectrum from those who want to turn back towards tradition to those who want to completely secularise. In the middle, the researchers identified two different attitudes to compromise: those who want more generic values education and those want to recontextualise traditional texts by creating new interpretations, the Catholic equivalent of modern Midrash.
Evidence from the Catholic research shows generic values education pushes towards secularisation while recontexualisation is more likely to produce students who find new meaning in old traditions.
But, while values education is generic and uncontroversial, recontextualisation embraces the particularity of the tradition, requiring knowledge and a repudiation of fashionable universalism.
In our terms that means it’s not enough to enable students to raise money for the homeless and call it tikkun olam. They also need to adapt a Seder, write a drash or argue over the relevance of a page of Talmud, in a way which enables them to bring their own understandings to the table.
The belief scale measures not only what school communities believe but also what they believe about believing. One axis ranges from absolute believers to equally convinced disbelievers; the other from those who believe in literal and objective truth to those with a concept of religious knowledge that is post-critical, metaphorical and open to different or subjective truths.
Judaism is manifestly less interested in belief than Catholicism. We may care more that our children learn to daven than whether they believe in God, that they celebrate Shavuot rather than accept revelation. But as Jewish schools struggle to answer the “Why bother?” of a new generation, an evaluation of where our school communities sit on this spectrum might help us give more honest – and convincing – answers.
Most Australian Jews are comfortable with far less than absolute belief and a post-critical concept of religious knowledge. We teach history, literature and politics with this degree of subtlety but we don’t apply it to Jewish studies. Students who call us out on our hypocrisy often throw out the whole package. Using a belief spectrum may enable a more real engagement with issues of motivation and commitment.
How we teach from this belief and identity base is the subject of the third scale, which measures both the intensity of school identity and the degree of openness to outside influences.
Intensity is a big issue for Jewish schools: we often hear complaints that a school is becoming “too Jewish” or that another is “not a Jewish school, just a school for Jews”.
Openness to other religions within the school is less an issue: while Catholic schools service many non-Catholics, Jewish schools have few non-Jews. But the openness paradigm would be valuable for considering how a school responds to diversity within the Jewish community: mixed marriages, gay families, conversion issues, economic difference, and disability for starters. The ECSI model makes it clear that embracing diversity need not come at the cost of a strong core identity.
Already one Muslim school is looking at applying these scales to another religious context. It would be great to see Jewish schools working to adapt this kind of self-awareness to our own education system, especially if we could do it together.
Illustration: John Kron
