Edutopia

School is a gift. I struggled through much of high school to actually appreciate my education. I knew I had a zest for learning throughout, but it wasn’t always obvious to me whether or not I was going about doing it in the right way. Certainly by junior year I was committed to being a student, but partly because I was also taking on more leadership in the high school. Since I first became involved with the organization Free The Children in seventh grade, the issue of education for all has been at the top of my list in terms of the priorities I believe our society should set. I believe that many of the world’s problems can be traced to lack of education, which then affects leadership and communication among other things. I believe in flexible educational models for different spheres. In Young Judaea I have focused on educating the next generation of Jewish leaders. In developing and running Global Citizenship Seminar workshops, I have carried my educational philosophy into addressing some of the major issues that I observed in my community in Acton regarding identity development and civic engagement. Regardless of whether or not I become a teacher in my life, I hope that I will be an educator.

I chose Kivunim largely for its educational program—including the learning that happens outside the classroom. Here, as Peter Geffen puts it, the line between formal and informal, between intellectual and experiential learning is blurred beyond recognition. To a greater extent than ever before, the classes I take are a part of all 24 hours of my life—and not because of the amount of homework, which is actually satisfyingly rigorous by the way. I find myself speaking Hebrew and Arabic outside of class. I find myself walking on the land of the Middle East studies course. This year I will be granted the dream of any student: to get to go to the place s/he studies. After a week of studying Greek history, I can only imagine how meaningful it’s going to be to go there in a month. (It’s not the first time in my life… I did have the privilege of living in the birthplace of the Revolutionary War, but t’s different.)

I am really inspired by what we’re doing here from a strictly curricular standpoint, but what’s also interesting to me is the organizational genius of the mission behind it, which actually might be at the root of educational goals in general. When I graduated from Young Judaea a few months ago, it was clear to me that what one does after s/he graduates is just as, if not more, important than what s/he does during the actual years of involvement during youth. An element of the change that YJ aims to espouse in the world comes from the leadership skills and Jewish identity that its members develop in the movement that they ultimately carry into their adult lives.

This appears to be part of the vision behind Kivunim. Peter and I have talked about the need for a “Teach For America for the Jewish People”. Teach For America is an organization that recruits a corp of college graduates to teach in inner city schools for a couple of years before getting another job. Again with the long-reaching personal growth goals, TFA hopes, more than that people finish their service with a commitment to become teachers, that they go into all fields of work as advocates for education. It is TFA’s vision that doctors, lawyers, politicians, scientists, and business-owners will have inter-sector interests in promoting institutional and structural change around education. Going back to what I said in the beginning about the need for flexible education models for different communities and cultures, it appears that a TFA-like organization wouldn’t be bad for most of the world.

So what is Kivunim hoping we will graduate with? World consciousness, Israel sensitivity, Jewish friends, language skills, coexistence advocacy—the list goes on. We’ll mull over this throughout the year, but for now I’d like to make a really dramatic segue: education is a form of public service, and public service is a form of education.

The public service component of our program started last night. The director of this part of the program is a very spiritual and interesting personality named Daniel Bush. He runs a workshop for us each week to get us thinking about, in the most general sense, how to integrate our experiences. It’s not always obvious what the goals of these workshops are, but the experience is always vivid.

Last night we began with an exercise in which one person would move and the other person would try to move in real time to mirror their partner. Daniel suggested that we try to forget who was leading and who was following. Next we did a really powerful exercise, which flowed flawlessly into a rousing session of Life Stories later in the night. Two people would get up in front of the group, look into each other’s eyes, and each one would say what they thought the other person saw when they looked at them. I had the good fortune of being in the third and final pair, looking into Adin’s eyes.

This was one of the most powerful experiences yet. Trying to imagine what Adin was seeing when he looked at me, trying to see myself through Adin’s eyes, made me shake. Our friends in the audience would tell us that we were swaying in unison up there. I remember not thinking about anything. I remember there being no conscious creative process. I would later describe it as the same feeling as thinking in a second language—the moment when you stop consciously translating, and you just speak. As such, when I spoke, I couldn’t tell whose eyes I was looking through. To many it would appear that we were just talking about ourselves, but there was truly something more than that to the exercise. When I looked at Adin, I saw myself. I said, “He sees someone who he thinks he knows pretty well. He sees someone who is taking this very seriously. He sees someone who is nervous. He sees someone who is in the moment, right now.” Adin and I have a lot in common, but I felt like we were one. (It’s a interesting meditation on relationships in general, and how much of it is just two separate individual experiences, versus something that might actually be shared.) He told me that when I said “right now” he was afraid that he would think about something else, but he didn’t. There was a real presence to it. How many of us have ever tried not to think about something and failed? I have never felt so free from everything else. At the same time, we were very much a part of the general scene in the room, and the community experience.

Something I wish would have been emphasized is how something like that is as much about the audience as it is about the two people in front. Everyone in that situation has an opportunity to try to put themselves in someone else’s shoes, even if it becomes increasingly convoluted (put yourself in the shoes of someone who’s trying to put themselves in the shoes of someone trying to put themselves in their shoes, trying to look at themselves…ETC!). This echoes the collective and personal dynamic of the Life Story exercise, so it was a natural activity for after the workshop.

However, given that this collective experience was not discussed explicitly, after the moment between me and Adin, the group offered their observations as they had done twice before with two earlier pairs. Their words ranged from cynical to appreciative, empathetic to detached. Our experience brought up different things for different people. After the feedback we moved into a poetry analysis exercise with “Jerusalem 1967” by Yehudah Amichai. In the same way that the pair exercise was picked apart by the group, now we analyzed the poem, another piece of raw humanity. We often wonder if artists intend to convey the depth that we can read into their work, or if it just comes out and then we draw patterns because that’s was humans do. It’s probably a little of both, but anyone, including artists, can be unaware of their humanity or the meaning behind their actions. Again, Kivunim showed us the importance of being able to process our experiences in order to get the most out of our lives (again, a session of Life Stories went late into the night…). No doubt this is important as we move into the world of community service…

This morning the actual work behind Daniel Bush’s curriculum started, and we went out into different parts of Jerusalem to do the various projects that we’ll continue all year, as part of a natural desire to actively give back to our host community. I always envisioned myself doing something with education or coexistence (go figure), but I would never have imagined the way that those terms would play out in the reality of what we call “Social Responsibility Projects”.

I will be spending the better part of every Thursday in a school called the Variety Center. The Variety Center is basically an early childhood development center, where mainstream and special needs children come together in fourteen different kindergartens (something to do with education). There are Jews and Arabs, autistic kids, mentally retarded kids, healthy kids, and babies (and multi-dimensional coexistence!). I couldn’t be happier with my placement. The group of six Kivunim volunteers get to play with these kids in what they call the “playground”. The playground is basically a room full of interactive learning stations. I’ll give a few examples. There are remote-controlled cars, and computer puzzles, and interactive music machines. There is a television monitor that shows the person standing in front of it in a world full of bubbles; that lucky person just swings his or here arms and watches the bubbles burst on the screen. There is a machine that essentially amounts to a giant blow-drier, which suspends a weighted balloon in the air as the conductor of the blower tries to guide the balloon through a hoop. The place is incredible. It’s a really rich environment, which would probably be good for anyone—special needs or not; there’s a room called “Snoozeland” that’s full of lights, colors and cushions, which is supposed to help kids who are either hyper- or hypo-sensitive. I’m going to get to practice a lot of Hebrew and Arabic (kids are great for my level of vocabulary).

I wonder if these kids appreciate their education in this special place, but if my interest in education has taught me anything, it is that education is as much about the so-called students as it is about the teachers. If it will be very rewarding, it will definitely be very difficult at times too. Such is the essence of a good education. The easy, the challenging, inside the classroom, and outside the classroom; we are the listeners and the speakers; we are in the audience and on center stage: such is the essence of a life of learning.