interested in science. When I came across concepts I couldn’t understand, our teachers always seemed able to answer my questions or help me find the answers myself. I liked the school enormously. I might well have gone on to finish my secondary education there. I probably should have. But the next year, the kibbutz brought us back again.
One of the considerations was financial. Like many kibbutzim, Mishmar Hasharon concluded that in order to make its school more economically sustainable it would take in a number of “outside children” — yeldei chutz — from towns and settlements around Israel. Yet this latest policy change was also triggered a debate over the kind of education kibbutzim should provide. Should a kibbutz school offer a curriculum tailored to passing the bagrut, the matriculation exam, and going on to university? Or should it limit itself to a fairly basic education geared to developing the talents needed for a productive life on the kibbutz? In a series of heated debates in the dining hall, almost all of Mishmar Hasharon supported the model of a basic, kibbutz-oriented education.
My father was the leading voice among the dissenters, and though it seemed obvious he was fighting an uphill battle, I remember feeling a sense of pride at watching him — and an echo in my own impulse to reach my own judgment about issues and to act on it as | was growing older. Not only was he opposed to the new policy. He was aghast. In the only time I can recall his speaking out at one of the weekly kibbutz meetings, he asked how Mishmar Hasharon could take upon itself the right to constrain an individual child’s life potential. “We are Jews!” he said. “We are people who have left our impact on history through our scholars, not our peasants. I can’t understand how we, who came here to open a new chapter in the history of our people, can choose to keep our sons and daughters from studying. We should encourage them to study!” He accepted that the interests of the kibbutz mattered. But what kind of “model society” would we be creating if we chose to “doom our own children to ignorance, and cut them off from the great forward momentum of history in Israel and the whole world?”
Especially in a kibbutz, however, the majority ruled. In this case, it was nearly unanimous, my mother included. I could see she felt torn, whether because she agreed with my father or because she realized how deeply he felt. But she accepted the decision. For her, that was what was meant by being part of the larger kibbutz family. Still, my father didn’t give up. He couldn’t change the kibbutz’s ruling. But he tried to get me to stay at the regional high school. A couple of years earlier, examiners had fanned out across Israel to administer its
At HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011512