When they ask about…doing well at school

It’s that time of year when teachers are hurriedly completing final assessments, reports are being written, exams sat and, for Year 12 students, the anxious wait for final results and course offers.

With these VCE and HSC results (and other state equivalents) come rankings of schools by study scores, perfect subject scores, highest possible scores. ATAR averages are tossed about, newspaper supplements feature lists of high-performing students, schools publish their stats and stories are shared of the duxes.

It is well known that Jewish students and schools achieve outstanding academic results disproportionate to our numbers. Why?

The first and foremost reason is that these results are hard-earned. Students, their teachers (believe me, I was a Year 12 teacher for 15 years!), excellent schools, and supportive families expend maximal effort to attain strong results.

This application of grit is in turn clearly related to wider sociological factors. Whereas in other schools it may be making the firsts in football or cricket, in a Jewish context it’s more often the intellect that is lauded. Furthermore, centuries of persecution, forced migration and dislocation have led to a recognition of education as the most valuable and enduring asset one can have; portable too - "The one thing they can never take away from you," my grandmother said.

Additionally, being surrounded by peers who are committed to their studies spurs on an aspirational approach, while coming from a family where one or both parents are university educated is a major determiner of a child’s academic outcomes, as they serve as role models and explicitly and/or implicitly communicate expectations.

Discredited racially-based theories about supposed Jewish intellectual superiority should rightly be dismissed, but the critical role of cultural DNA must be recognised.

Since the late Second Temple period when Shimon ben-Shetach instituted compulsory primary education for boys (girls were schooled in more domestic skills, although some wealthier girls were literate and studied Jewish texts), Jewish communities have seen it not just as a parental obligation but a communal one to fulfil the biblical imperative to teach our children. According to the Talmud, along with a blood-letter, a judge, people to collect and dispense charity and a handful of other roles, every community must have a teacher of children.

Ensuring our children are Jewishly literate so they are capable of taking on the demands of Torah living and, in time, entrusted to transmit this lore and law to the next generation is one thing. But excelling in all manner of subjects from mathematics to literature, business management to physical education is quite another.

To our children who wonder about the perceived emphasis on doing well at school, we need to communicate that it matters primarily because anything that is done, should be done well. This is a crucial life lesson. It’s not the number or grade or comment on a report per se that matters, but the story behind it about effort, mindset, ability and approach. This applies for all ages and stages.

I’ve never much liked the distinction between school and ‘the real world’. For a major part and indeed the formative stage of one’s journey, school and life are intertwined. Important habits of mind and learning approaches are developed and may be set there.

Students come to school with different abilities and different challenges. The model of our current school system is largely a product of the industrial revolution when education was widely extended beyond the elites and an efficient and economically viable method of doing so was required. Twenty-five students (give or take a few, in other parts of the world many more) and one teacher studying the same content and given the same tasks may be efficient but allows for little latitude in individual learning styles, an area of intense pedagogic focus in recent years.

Jewish teaching practices recognised these differences approximately two millennia ago, with Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) describing four different types of students (one who learns quickly and forgets quickly, one who learns slowly and forgets slowly…) and comparing the retention capacity of Torah scholars with household implements (the sponge, the funnel, the strainer, the sifter).

Doing well at school means doing the best you can with who you are and what you’ve got. Success must be understood and valued at a subjective level.

Accomplishment must also embody the whole person: social, emotional, their multiple intelligences. It involves making friends and being a friend, contributing to the school community, being respectful of the adults in the room, trying out a range of offerings and stretching beyond one’s comfort zone to try out sports, theatre, debating, arts and camps, thereby experimenting with and extending one’s concept of self. This is what we want for our children and must transmit to them, along with the unconditional love and a steadying presence to meet the inevitable failures and missteps along the way.

Intelligence and academic achievement involve much more than learning content and reproducing it on demand. True learning means being able to use the material in creative ways to address novel situations and contribute to the world in some way, large or small.

Jewish values are beautifully illustrated in the story of Nobel prize winner in Physics Isidor Rabi whose mother, never asked "What did you learn at school today?" but greeted her son with "Did you ask a good question today?"

The story teaches not only the value of questioning but also the importance of being genuinely interested in our children’s minds, in how they approach the world, in engendering in them the confidence to ask questions and helping them to integrate and extend the answers. This is of the essence as we accompany our young people on their learning journeys.