http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2470-0904
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Abstract
This paper focuses on the “Junkyard” (chatzar grutaot) – a unique educational environment and practice developed in kindergartens on the Israeli kibbutz in the 1940s and 1950s, and still in wide use today in kibbutz kindergartens. The Junkyard, consisting of artefacts of the adult world that are no longer in use, is an ever-changing set-up in which children’s free play is encouraged, with minimal rules for use of time, space, objects, and social relations. Anchored in the writings of its two founding educators, as well as in writings of and interviews with its advocates and instructors over the years, this paper shows how the Junkyard drew on widespread ideas about early childhood development and education, at the same time as it responded to local conditions and concerns. The paper argues that a unique conjunction of factors – material and structural, educational and pedagogical, ideological and cultural – facilitated the process by which the Junkyard was inserted relatively smoothly into the kibbutz educational landscape, in lasting ways.
Acknowledgments
Deborah Golden wishes to thank Haya Israeli for first drawing her attention to the Junkyard as a worthy topic of study.
Notes
1 Roberta Wollons, “Introduction: On the International Diffusion, Politics, and Transformation of the Kindergarten,” in Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea, ed. Roberta Wollons (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 1–15.
2 Wollons, “Introduction,” 2.
3 Catherine Burke, Peter Cunningham, and Ian Grosvenor, “‘Putting Education in its Place’: Space, Place and Materialities in the History of Education,” History of Education 39, no. 6 (2010): 677.
4 See Kathryn Anderson-Levitt, “A World Culture of Schooling?,” in Local Meanings, Global Schooling: Anthropology and World Culture Theory, ed. Kathryn Anderson-Levitt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 1–26; Kathryn Anderson-Levitt, “The Schoolyard Gate: Schooling and Childhood in Global Perspective,” Journal of Social History 38, no. 4 (2005): 987–1006; Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs, and Kate Rousmaniere, eds., Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post)-Colonial Education (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2014).
5 Tobin and colleagues compared preschool settings in Japan, China, and the United States during the 1980s and then again two decades later. See: Joseph Tobin, David Y. H. Wu, and Dana H. Davidson, Preschool in Three Cultures: Japan, China and the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Joseph Tobin, Mayumi Karasawa, and Yeh Hsueh, Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited: China, Japan and the United States (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
6 Robert Cowen, “The Transfer, Translation and Transformation of Educational Processes: And their Shape-Shifting?,” Comparative Education 45, no. 3 (2009): 315.
7 The material culture of preschools in semi-rural settings in Canada, India, and South Africa are compared in Larry Prochner, Ailie Cleghorn, and Nicole Green, “Space Considerations: Materials in the Learning Environment in Three Majority World Preschool Settings,” International Journal of Early Years Education 16, no. 3 (2008): 189–201.
8 For a study of changes in the material environments in American kindergartens from 1869 to 1939 with a focus on Froebel's building gifts, see: Larry Prochner, “‘Their Little Wooden Bricks”: A History of the Material Culture of Kindergarten in the United States,” Paedagogica Historica 47, no. 1 (2011): 355–75.
9 Malka Haas, The Junkyard (Sde Eliyahu: Publisher unknown, 1972) (in Hebrew); Malka Haas, Kindergarten Children Working in the Yard [Yaldei hagan ovdim bachatzer] (Oranim Teaching College, 1977) (in Hebrew); Reprinted in Einat Amitay, A Gift for Our Children: Culture for Children in Kibbutzim (Ein Harod Museum of Art, 2012), 129–37) (in Hebrew); Malka Haas, Kindergarten Children in the Yard [Yaldei hagan bachatzer] (Tel Aviv: Sifryat Hapoalim, 1985); Malka Haas, “Children in the Junkyard,” Childhood Education 72, no. 6 (1996): 345–51; Malka Haas and Cilla Gavish, Mommy Look, it is Real: The Junkyard as Model for Early Childhood Education (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2008) (in Hebrew); Yael Dayan, A Different Educator: Conversations with Gideon Levin (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2001); Gideon Levin, The Activity Yard in the Kindergarten [Chatzer hagruataot bagan] (Kiryat Tivon: Oranim College, 1977) (in Hebrew); Gideon Levin, A Different Kindergarten: The Kindergarten Theory of Activity Flow (Kiryat Bialik: Ach Publishers Limited, 1989) (in Hebrew); Gideon Levin and Zipora Nir, Let’s Play for Real (Tel Aviv: Sifryiat Hapoalim, 1980) (in Hebrew).
10 Igal Mosko, Interview with Malka Haas, Channel 2 News, September 12, 2014, https://www.mako.co.il/news-channel2/Friday-Newscast-q3_2014/Article-1c57a4e4cca6841004.htm (accessed July 6, 2017); Nancy R. Smith, “The Workyards of Sde Eliyahu: Places to Learn Resourcefulness,” Beginnings 2, no. 2 (1985): 19–23; Carl Steinitz, “The Junkyard Playground of Malka Haas,” in Kibbutz: Architecture Without Precedents, ed. G. Bar (Tel Aviv: Top Print, 2010), 258–61; Shira Tsarfati, Orit Praag, and Yael Yedidya, “Queen of the Yard [Malkat Hachatzer]”, Hazman Hayarok, January 22, 2009, https://www.kibbutz.org.il/itonut/2009/dafyarok/090122_malka_has.htm (accessed July 11, 2015).
11 Israel Ministry of Education, The Junkyard: Guidelines for the Kindergarten Teacher [Chatzer Hagan: Madrich Leganenet] (Jerusalem: Ministry of Education, 1995) (in Hebrew).
12 Yehudit Ein-Dor, interview by Orit Dror, July 24, 2016, Oranim; Cilla Gavish, interview by Ora Aviezer, November 10, 2016, Oranim; Michal Golan, interview by Ora Aviezer, July 7, 2016; Ayelet Lahav, interview by Moshe Shner, September 20, 2016, Oranim.
13 Wollons, Kindergartens and Cultures.
14 Shoshana Sitton, “Education and Culture in Early Childhood: A Revolution in Jewish Schooling, 1899–1948,” in Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea, ed. Roberta Wollons (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 274–89.
15 Yuval Dror, The History of Kibbutz Education: Practice into Theory (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2002), 20 (in Hebrew).
16 Ora Aviezer, Marinus van IJzendoorn, Abraham Sagi, and Carlo Schuengel, “‘Children of the Dream’ Revisited: 70 Years of Collective Early Child Care in Israeli Kibbutzim,” Psychological Bulletin 116 (1994): 99–116. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.116.1.
17 Stanley Diamond, “Kibbutz and Shtetl: The History of an Idea,” Social Problems 5 (1957): 71–99.
18 Menachem Gerson, Family, Women and Socialization in the Kibbutz (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1978).
19 Melford E. Spiro, “An Experiment in Infant Care: Children of the Kibbutz,” reprinted in Anthropology and Child Development: A Cross-Cultural Reader, ed. Robert A. LeVine and Rebecca S. New (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008 [1958]), 143–55.
20 Bruno Bettelheim, The Children of the Dream (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1969).
21 Eliahu Regev, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, and Ruth Sharabany, “Affective Expression in Kibbutz-communal, Kibbutz-familial, and City-raised Children in Israel,” Child Development 51 (1980): 223–37.
22 Aviezer, van IJzendoorn, Sagi, and Schuengel, “‘Children of the Dream’ Revisited,” 99–116; Ora Aviezer, Abraham Sagi, and Marinus van IJzendoorn, “Balancing the Family and the Collective in Raising Children: Why Communal Sleeping in Kibbutzim Was Predestined to End,” Family Process 41 (2002): 435–54. doi:10.1111/j.1545-5300.2002.41310.x
23 Rachel Levy-Shiff and Michael A. Hoffman, “Social Behavior of Urban and Kibbutz Preschool Children in Israel,” Developmental Psychology 21, no. 6 (1984): 1204–5; Ariella Shapira and Madsen C. Millard, “Between- and Within-Group Cooperation and Competition among Kibbutz and Nonkibbutz Children,” Developmental Psychology 10, no. 1 (1974): 114–45.
24 Emanuel Berman, “Communal Upbringing on the Kibbutz,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 43 (1988): 319–35.
25 Rachel Levy-Shiff, “Adaptation and Competence in Early Childhood: Communally Raised Kibbutz Children Versus Family Raised Children in the City,” Child Development 54 (1983): 1606–14.
26 Dror, The History of Kibbutz Education, 51.
27 Given this lacunae, we are currently supervising two students’ theses in this regard.
28 Eliezer Ben-Rafael, “Kibbutz: Survival at Risk,” Israel Studies 16 (2011): 94.
29 Steven Bialostok and Robert Whitman, “Education and the Risk Society: An Introduction,” in Education and the Risk Society: Theories, Discourse and Risk Identities in Education Contexts, ed. Steven Bialostok, Robert Whitman, and William Bradley (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2012), 1–34.
30 In her history of playgrounds in America, Susan Solomon traces the conjoining of safety regulations and commercial interests since the 1960s. See: Susan G. Solomon, American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2005), 77–88.
31 Liri Andi-Findeling, Tsipi Schindler, and Michal Hemo-Lotem, “Betichut Yeladim Beganei Sha’ashuim [Child Safety in Playgrounds],” Position paper presented at the National Forum of Child Safety, Beterem, https://www.eshet.org/gotmail/playsafty.pdf (accessed 11 July, 2015) (in Hebrew).
32 Dafna Arad, “Why Aren’t Playgrounds So Much Fun Anymore?,” Haaretz, April 27, 2014 (in Hebrew); Janny Scott, “When Child’s Play is Too Simple; Experts Criticize Safety-Conscious Recreation as Boring,” New York Times, July 15, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/15/arts/when-child-s-play-too-simple-experts-criticize-safety-conscious-recreation.html (accessed July 6, 2017).
33 Judith Hicks and John Hicks, “Razor Blades and Teddy Bears – the Health and Safety Protocol,” in Children’s Spaces, ed. Mark Dudek (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005), 195–214.
34 See von Baldegg’s 2014 interview with the filmmaker Erin Davis on her documentary about the Welsh adventure playground The Land (Von Baldegg, Kasia Cieplak-Mayr, “Inside a European Adventure Playground,” The Atlantic, March 19, 2014), https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/europes-adventure-playgrounds-look-way-more-fun/284521/ (accessed July 6, 2017); see also Solomon, American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space, 72–77 on the rise and fall of the Yard in Berkeley California as part of the People’s Park, and the subsequent opening of the Adventure Playground there in 1979 which is in current use.
35 Cheli Zelinger, Head of Department of Early Education at the Kibbutz Movement, personal communication, December 10, 2016. The Kibbutz Movement is the central representative of all kibbutzim: it deals with government and regional authorities on all levels and provides a variety of services related to different aspects of daily life, https://www.kibbutz.org.il/eng/081101_kibbutz-eng.htm (accessed December 11, 2016).
36 Quoted in Roy Kozlovsky, “Adventure Playgrounds and Postwar Reconstruction,” in Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of Children, ed. Marta Gutman and Ning De Coninck-Smith (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 174.
37 Kozlovsky, “Adventure Playgrounds and Postwar Reconstruction,” 173–75.
38 Kozlovsky, “Adventure Playgrounds and Postwar Reconstruction,” 175–82.
39 Haas, “Children in the Junkyard,” 345.
40 Whether Miriam Levin had prior knowledge of Haas’s work is unclear (Ein-Dor, interview, 2016).
41 Snapir Miriam, Shoshana Sitton, and Gila Russo-Zimet, The Israeli Kindergarten in the 20th Century (Sde Boker: Ben-Gurion Research Institute, 2012), 93–4 (in Hebrew).
42 Gavish, interview.
43 Haas, Kindergarten Children Working in the Yard, 129–37.
44 Haas, Kindergarten Children Working in the Yard, 129–37.
45 Gavish, interview.
46 Ein-Dor, interview.
47 Gavish, interview.
48 For an outline of theories of borrowing and its accompanying stages, primarily with regard to educational policy, see: Eckhardt Fuchs, “History of Education Beyond the Nation? Trends in Historical and Educational Scholarship,” in Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post)-Colonial Education, ed. Barnita Bachgi, Eckhardt Fuchs, and Kate Rousmaniere (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2014), 20.
49 Solomon, American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space, 7–41.
50 Yechezkel Dar, “Kibbutz Education: A Sociological Account,” Journal of Moral Education 24, no. 3 (1995): 225–44.
51 Dror, The History of Kibbutz Education, 77.
52 Snapir, Sitton, and Russo-Zimet, The Israeli Kindergarten in the 20th Century, 93–4.
53 Ein-Dor, interview.
54 Dror, The History of Kibbutz Education, 97–8; Ein-Dor, interview; Gavish, interview; Golan, interview; Lahav, interview.
55 Wollons, Kindergartens and Cultures.
56 Helen Tovey, Playing Outdoors: Spaces and Places, Risk and Challenge (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2007), 40–1.
57 Mark Dudek, Kindergarten Architecture: Space for the Imagination (London: E. and F.N. Spoon, 1996), 86.
58 Tovey, Playing Outdoors: Spaces and Places, Risk and Challenge.
59 Orit Ben David, “Tiyul (Hike) as an Act of Consecration of Space,” in Grasping Land: Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse and Experience, ed. Eyal Ben Ari and Yoram Bilu (New York: SUNY, 1997), 129–47. But see Seltenreich (Yair Seltenreich, “‘Children of our Future’: Climate, Degeneration and Education in Hebrew Society in Mandatory Palestine (1917–1948)”, History of Education 45, no. 1 (2016): 335–51 for a discussion of fears among educators of the degenerative effect of the environment in Palestine.
60 Erik Cohen, The City in the Zionist Ideology (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1970).
61 Yehoshua Margolin’s call was originally published in 1947 and is reprinted in a collection of sources edited by Einat Amitay and published on the occasion of an exhibition on children’s culture on the kibbutzim. See: “The Child in Nature” (Hayeled bateva), reprinted in Einat Amitay, A Gift for Our Children: Culture for Children in Kibbutzim (Ein Harod Museum of Art, 2012), 107–12 (in Hebrew).
62 Polakow quoted in Haas “Children in the Junkyard,” 345.
63 UNICEF, Convention on the Rights of the Child, https://www.unicef.org/crc/ (accessed July 17, 2015).
64 Dar, “Kibbutz Education: A Sociological Account”.
65 Tamar Katriel, “Gibush: The Crystallization Metaphor in Israeli Cultural Semantics,” in Communal Webs: Communication and Culture in Contemporary Israel (Albany: State University of New York, 1991), 11–34.
66 Tobin, Wu, and Davidson, Preschool in Three Cultures: Japan, China and the United States, 12–71.
67 Helen Penn, Understanding Early Childhood: Issues and Controversies, 3rd ed. (Maidenhead and New York: Open University Press, 2014), 180–1.
68 Carolyn Pope Edwards, “Three Approaches from Europe: Waldorf, Montessori and Reggio Emilia,” Early Childhood Research and Practice 4, no. 1 (2002): 7.
69 David Biale, “Zionism as an Erotic Revolution,” in People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective, ed. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 283–307.
70 Tamar Katriel, Talking Straight: Dugri Speech in Israeli Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
71 Seltenreich, “‘Children of our Future’: Climate, Degeneration and Education in Hebrew Society in Mandatory Palestine,” 340.
72 Haas, “Children in the Junkyard”; Levin and Nir, Let’s Play for Real, 50–4.
73 Haas, “Children in the Junkyard,” 350,
74 Haas, Kindergarten Children Working in the Yard, 134.
75 Kozlovsky, “Adventure Playgrounds and Postwar Reconstruction,” 173.
76 Maria Montessori, Education for a New World (Madras: Kalakshetra Publications, 1947), 87.
77 Peter Kraftl, Geographies of Alternative Education: Diverse Learning Spaces for Children and Young People (Bristol: Policy Press, 2013), 123–4.
78 Linda App and Margaret MacDonald, “Classroom Aesthetics in Early Childhood Education,” Journal of Education and Learning 1, no. 1 (2012): 50.
79 Oz Almog, The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2000); Katriel, Talking Straight: Dugri Speech in Israeli Culture.
80 Katriel, Talking Straight: Dugri Speech in Israeli Culture.
81 Cohen, The City in the Zionist Ideology.
82 This however did not preclude the use of toys on the kibbutz and the establishment of small factories on kibbutzim for the manufacture of toys; see Amitay, A Gift for Our Children: Culture for Children in Kibbutzim, 181–218.
83 Haas, Kindergarten Children Working in the Yard.
84 Ein-Dor, interview.
85 Golan, interview.
86 App and MacDonald, “Classroom Aesthetics in Early Childhood Education”.
87 Malka Haas, interview by Igal Mosko.
88 Tsarfati, Praag, and Yedidya, “Queen of the Yard [Malkat Hachatzer]”.
89 Haas, “Children in the Junkyard,” 349.
90 Haas, Kindergarten Children Working in the Yard, 135.
91 George E. Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 24 (1995):106–8.
92 Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
93 Wollons, Kindergartens and Cultures, 10.
94 Antonio Novoa and Tali Yariv-Mashal, “Comparative Research in Education: A Mode of Governance or a Historical Journey,” Comparative Education 39, no. 4 (2003): 430.
95 Erica Burman provides an early critique of this looseness inasmuch as it allows for an implicit preference for middle-class ways. See Erica Burman, Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 163–76.
96 Martin Lawn and Ian Grosvenor, “‘When in Doubt, Preserve”: Exploring the Traces of Teaching and Material Culture in English Schools,” History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 122–4.