Reinventing Jewish Education for the 21st Century

Abstract

A century ago a group of educators led an effort to transform American Jewish education to enable it to operate successfully in the 20th century. Today, with American Jews living under very different conditions, a similar effort is needed to reinvent Jewish education for the 21st century. Changes and new initiatives already taking place on the educational landscape point the way toward a set of paradigm shifts that will make Jewish education more learner-centered, relationship-infused, and life-relevant. These changes at the level of educational practice need to be accompanied by a redesign of the educational system itself to make it better able to accommodate learners as “prosumers,” helping to create their own educational experiences, and to guide them on lifelong learning journeys. By maximizing the impact of ongoing innovations, by employing “design thinking,” and by forging stronger networks and collective impact initiatives across domains and settings, the Jewish educational system can be reinvented to meet the needs and aspirations of 21st century Jewish learners.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Maya Bernstein, James Hyman, Leora Isaacs, Cyd Weissman, and Meredith Woocher who provided valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

¹The term “prosumer” actually has taken on several different meanings since it was originally coined by Alvin Toffler (1980). Originally, it designated someone who had the characteristics of a “near professional” among otherwise “amateur” users of a particular product or service. It also has been used to describe unusually active consumers who are “early adopters,” advocates, or otherwise influence other consumers. However, the term is increasingly used as it is here to refer to individuals who are simultaneously producers and consumers of their own experiences.

²One can rightfully argue that the issue of meaning has always been central to Jewish education. However, what makes the urgency of this question for American Jewish education different today than in the recent past is the context in which it is being asked. For most of the second half of the 20th century, large numbers of American Jews found almost self-evident meaning in a story of “sacred survival” that was playing out dramatically on the stage of history (Woocher, 1986). Jewish education readily embraced this story, which supported its survivalist mission. However, this story has been losing much of its power as a source of meaning over the past two decades, and as the search for Jewish meaning has turned increasingly from the collective-tribal to the personal-universal realm, Jewish education is being asked to provide a new set of answers to what is admittedly an old question.

³Claiming that the changes taking place in Jewish education today represent a clear paradigm shift from “how we understood/did things then” to “how we understand/do things now” admittedly oversimplifies reality. Jewish education today is clearly a mix of “what was” and “what is emerging.” Further, not all of the innovations being made or proposed point in the same direction. Many things are going on simultaneously in Jewish education, animated by a wide range of concerns (“patch dynamics”). But, many of today's innovative and change-oriented activities do share common themes and thrusts that differentiate them sufficiently from what has been customary practice to justify labeling them as exemplars of a paradigm shift. Ultimately, even more than the specific innovations themselves, it is the new paradigm—the new way of thinking about, implementing, and organizing Jewish education—that will drive future transformational efforts.

⁴Some writers draw a distinction between “co-creation”—having users actively engaged in the design of the services they receive—and “co-production,” in which the users participate as well in the actual delivery of the service (Bason, 2010). Both phenomena are part of the paradigm shift taking place in Jewish education today. The latter asks more of learners and families, but is also even closer, perhaps, to the Jewish ideal.

⁵There are probably two reasons for this nonlinear impact. The first is the creation of a positive feedback loop: The more one learns and experiences Jewishly, the easier and more meaningful subsequent Jewish engagement becomes, which inspires more learning, etc. (Saxe, 2011). The second is a likely step effect: As in other areas of learning, there is a threshold beyond which the pace of acquiring new knowledge and understanding can increase greatly. Many Jewish learners never reach that threshold, but for those who do, the impact of additional Jewish learning can be substantial.

⁶To sample this conversation, one can go to a growing list of websites: edutopia.org; educationevolving.org; knowledgeworks.org; reinventingeducation.org; ted21c.ning.com (Transforming Education for the 21st Century); 21stcenturyschools.com; curriculum21.ning.com; futureofeducation.com; futureofed.org; education.ted.com; pathsoflearning.net; and a host of others.

⁷Maya Bernstein, an outstanding Jewish educator working at innovation inclubator Upstart Bay Area, has suggested that there is even greater value in connecting with others working on comparable change beyond the Jewish community: “We could do a lot more than just observe and try to replicate secular models. There is tremendous opportunity, especially if your design is to have the ‘path’ mimic the ‘goal,’ to think about working closely with other minority/diversity/culture groups to think about how they're transmitting their values in today's global world, to share Judaism's richness with other cultures, to share best practices and challenges, etc. I think that in order for this to be successful, Jewish education innovators need to model collaboration outside the Jewish world, since their goal is to say—this has something to contribute to living a meaningful life, in general—they have to show that it is in ongoing relationship with the realm beyond itself” (M. Bernstein, Personal communication, 2012).

⁸The concept of “going to scale,” i.e., achieving a size and scope that allows for significant impact, is itself a complex one. Going to scale is sometimes equated with the originator of the innovation growing larger. But this is only one way of achieving greater impact. If the goal of innovation is to help catalyze broad-scale change, then embedding the innovation in existing distribution or delivery systems may bring it to scale much more rapidly than seeking to grow a new organization from scratch (Woocher, 2011). The originating organization may remain small, or even disappear, while the idea behind its flagship innovation or the program model it has developed spreads. Both approaches to going to scale—“growth” versus “adoption”—have advantages and present challenges. What is important in the end is the impact of the innovation, not who originated it. If a particular educational practice becomes normative, the odds are that many individuals will have had a hand in shaping it (“innovation is a social process”).