Nathan

Fein's Personal Philosophy of Education There is a combination between eternal truths and education based on times and places. There is no such thing as the perfect curriculum and I submit that everyone would agree to this. The perfect curriculum for one child could never be the same as for another child; place that same child in a different era and the perfect curriculum for that child is no longer appropriate. What we as educators must do is allow that child to grow and develop according to a core that each generation must deAine as normative, but also provide the leeway for each child to Aind their own path. This is not an easy task, nor is it a task of factory like schools, but it is right and society will beneAit due to these efforts. This educational design is closely related to the philosophy of progressivism, as there would be more activity based education and the curriculum is dynamic but only so far. The core of the Jewish education cannot stray too far aAield. If one of the purposes of Jewish education is to create continuity between the generations then there must be more than just continuity of action, but also of thought. However, in order to make this education palatable to the next generation we, as educators, must Aind ways to show its continued relevance. One of the strengths of Jewish education has been the connection between the students today and the students of yesteryear, quite similar to the Perrenialistic philosophy. Schools are not just factories, places designed to take materials and create a product, but rather places for children to grow, learn, explore, and hopefully take the education provided farther than would in that factory; schools must harness the natural curiosity of its students. If so, then schools must be designed to allow students to do this, a rigid curriculum cannot be effective, however, a total free-for-all with no vision to the past will

not provide any connection to the past nor will it teach why these subjects are continuously relevant. The student is not just an object of transference from one generation to another, but rather the student must feel as if this information was created just for them. It is this dialectic that we are trying to achieve, between continued relevance to the past, present, and future and on the other hand to make the student believe that they are each (regardless of academic ability) the most important cog in this network. A combination between perrenialism and progressivism is required to create the best educational system we can, one that is grounded in the past (that which makes Jewish education unique) and also dynamic enough to allow each child to become the greatest student they can. AlAie Kohn in The Schools Our Children Deserve (Houghton MifAlin, 1999) argues convincingly that a standard book-based and test centered curriculum is faulty even at the High-School level but is extremely unhelpful at the elementary and middle-school ages. What is required is a dynamic education that can provide the skills, without force feeding information to children because that never achieves the long term goals of education. This proposal, which might seem drastic to most teachers, really does get at the heart of education. A focus on Differentiated Instruction, which allows educators to teach to each individual student in the most effective manner for that student cannot be easily rectiAied with standardized testing. That there are eternal truths and ideas that we must transmit, I accept, but the manner in which those goals are achieved must be left up to the individual students.