Israel's education system is failing - Israeli students score well below all 39 OECD members save for Mexico - 

These data are more than disturbing; they are alarming.

A Nobel Future?

The Hour

By Leonard Fein

Published October 14, 2009, issue of October 23, 2009.

At last I have use of the word: Surprize! For that is surely the least that can be said about this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama.

But enough about that, maybe even too much. It’s a different Nobel Prize, with larger ramifications, that I find fascinating — to wit, this year’s prize in chemistry, awarded to Ada Yonath, of the Weizmann Institute of Science. Simply put, her research has determined the complete high-resolution structures of both ribosomal subunits and discovered within the otherwise asymmetric ribosome the universal symmetrical region that provides the framework and navigates the process of polypeptide polymerization. Consequently she showed that the ribosome is a ribozyme that places its substrates in stereochemistry suitable for peptide bond formation and for substrate-mediated catalysis.

Got that? The rest is easy.

Yonath is the first woman to win the prize in chemistry in 45 years, the ninth Israeli Nobel laureate. If you start the record in 1948, when Israel was born, you find that Israel is tied for 11th place in the number of Nobels its citizens have been awarded — three for peace, three for chemistry, two for economics and one for literature. It has been topped by the United States (279 Nobels), the United Kingdom (78), Germany (54), France (28), Russia (20), Sweden and Canada (17), Japan (16) and Switzerland (14). That’s not a shabby record for a small country. (India and China have five each, Austria, Poland and Australia have eight, and South Africa and the Netherlands, like Israel, have nine.)

Here is where it gets interesting: Israel’s winners were born in 1885 (Agnon), 1913 (Begin), 1922 (Rabin), 1923 (Peres) and, in the sciences, in 1930, 1934, 1937, 1939 and 1947. Let’s stay with the sciences, since the award of the peace prize, as we have once more been reminded, is rather more idiosyncratic. The Israeli winners in the sciences were, at the time of their award, 75, 70, 68, 67 and 57 years old. That’s standard for Nobel awards, since they tend to be given years after the work being honored has been completed. And that is why it is useful to ask whether the current crop of students in Israel is likely, 40 or more years from now, to produce new Nobel laureates.

Here are a few items from the extremely disquieting data:

According to Haaretz, last year 116,000 Israeli youngsters graduated from high school. Of these, 9,362 had studied some chemistry, 13,000 had studied some biology and 11,000 had studied some physics. That means that the vast majority of high school graduates were not exposed to science at all.

The still more disturbing statistic, drawn in the main from publications of the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel, requires a word of background: There are four different education “streams” in Israel. These include the national education stream, primarily for non-religious Jews; the Jewish national-religious stream; the fervently Orthodox (a term I prefer to “ultra-Orthodox”) or Haredi stream, and the Israeli Arab stream. In the year 2000, 39% of school-age children were enrolled in either Haredi or Arab schools. By the beginning of the current school year, those two streams accounted for 48% of all school-age children. From 2000 to 2009, the number of Arab pupils rose by 10% — and the number of Haredim rose by 51% (while enrollment rose by 8% in the national-religious schools and declined by 3% in the national education stream).

Although we have very little data on the Haredi schools (20% of all students), since they lack a national core curriculum and do not take part in nationwide tests, it is likely safe to assume that they lag well behind the other streams in math and science. This means that within the very near future, a majority of Israel’s schoolchildren will be drawn from the two sectors of society — Arab and Haredi — that perform well below international standards.

Those Israeli students who do take part in nationwide tests, as judged by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment, score well below all 39 OECD members save for Mexico in reading, with 39% of Israel’s students below proficiency (compared to the OECD-member average of 20%); 42% score in the lowest two categories in mathematics, and only 6% in the highest two (compared to the OECD averages of 21% and 13% respectively); in a general measure of science, they rank just ahead of Kyrgyzstan and Qatar, and rank 38th in their ability to use scientific evidence. (A part but not all of the deficit may be explained by the poor performance of children in the Arab sector, where schools are often underfunded.)

These data are more than disturbing; they are alarming. And they are about much more than Nobel Prizes. They give sinister credence to the widespread complaint in Israel that the education system is failing. Nor is there more reason for satisfaction if we look at Israel’s universities, which have suffered a budget cut of two billion shekels in the last decade (even as student enrollment has tripled in the last two decades), where one new staff member has been hired for every two who have retired.

Israel has long and correctly boasted that its principal natural resource is its people. That resource is not self-replenishing. And these days, inequality in education seems even more pronounced than the record-high inequality in income. Without a long-term and serious commitment both to general reform and, specifically, to reforms in both the Arab and Haredi sectors, a whirlwind approaches.

http://www.forward.com/articles/116768/

Muslims, Jews and the Nobel Prize

Nov. 2, 2009
uriya shavit , THE JERUSALEM POST

Next month, Prof. Ada Yonath will be awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry, becoming the fifth Israeli scientist to win this award. This has sharpened, once again, the grim statistics regarding the scarcity of Nobel laureates in the Muslim and Arab worlds. While Jews, who are only around 0.2 percent of the world population, have won a quarter of all Nobel Prizes awarded in the sciences, Muslims, who are one quarter of the world population, have won only a handful, even by the most generous accounts. And while relative to its size, Israel's tiny academia has been the world's leading Nobel power over the past decade, Arab universities have yet to produce their first Nobel laureate.
Israelis and Jews worldwide consider these awards a source of pride - and rightly so. It's always nice to be on a winning team. Muslims and Arabs view these numbers as a source of shame and even soul-searching. Even Muslim religious scholars who portray Western political systems, social foundations and cultural achievements as manifestations of infidel entities in decay recognize that the West's huge scientific and technological edge must be narrowed. Some openly discuss Israel's scientific achievements to encourage their followers to become more academically competitive.
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM offers a conventional explanation for the disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes in science awarded to Jews and Israelis: the "Jewish genius," whereas Muslims and Arabs fail because they live under dictatorships. This explanation is not completely detached from reality, but is, nevertheless, not sufficient.
The truth is that a certain type of Jew has won Nobel Prizes. These Jewish laureates drew on a Jewish heritage that dedicates itself to learning, reveres scholars and places intellectual demands on its young people. But these laureates were also modern Jews, open to modern sciences and rational thinking, and keen on making their way in the greater world that exists beyond their communities. Remove one part of this equation - heritage or modernity - and the "Jewish genius" vanishes.
This particular type of Jew is a nearly extinct species. Secular Jews, especially secular Israelis, are increasingly detached from the heritage of giving primacy to education and scholarship. They are inundated by a culture that reveres instant celebrity, shameless greed and utter stupidity. Observant Jews, especially observant Israelis, are increasingly facing trends that are hostile toward rationality, suspicious of modernity and indifferent to the merits of scientific experimentation.
Many lament the reduction in funds earmarked for sciences in Israel. But this is the symptom, not the disease. Where scientists receive no respect, they also receive little or no money. To continue winning Nobel Prizes, the Jewish world in general (and the State of Israel in particular) need more than financial resources. They need to defend and cultivate the particular kind of Jew who has been awarded one out of every four Nobel Prizes. And they must do so without caving in to political correctness or cultural relativism.
The case of the Muslim and Arab worlds also evokes a discussion. It is a historical fact that authoritarian regimes and dictatorships have produced inferior scientific achievements in comparison to liberal, open societies. Until its collapse, the Soviet Union lagged scientifically and technologically behind the United States; the gap increasingly widened and eventually led to the breakdown of the communist empire. However, the Soviet Union did excel in some sciences and produced many brilliant academics. The same holds for other non-democratic regimes.
Today, Stalinist North Korea sells technology to Stalinist Syria, not the other way round. Thus, the lack of political pluralism accounts for part of the Muslim and Arab scientific failures. But it does not explain why they are so absolute.
Another explanation is the lack of religious and intellectual freedom in most Muslim societies, where religious scholars have monopolized the spiritual and the metaphysical in a way that disrupts scientific progress. What does a monopoly of the spiritual and the metaphysical have to do with the study of chemistry or physics? Everything. Science can only flourish in a culture that does not recognize any taboos and constantly doubts creeds of all sorts. Nobel laureates cannot grow from cultures that raise kids from an early age to never question a certain conceptualization of reality.
This does not imply that science and religion are not commensurable; some of the world's greatest scientists have been deeply religious. But it is almost impossible for great scientific minds to exhaust their potential in societies where the clergy have ultimate control over intellectual quests.
IN THE late 19th century, a reform movement emerged in the Muslim world. It recognized that for Muslims to embark on an age of renaissance, modern sciences must be embraced. Reformists endeavored to convince Muslims that modern sciences do not contradict Islam - and were quite successful in doing so. This school, developed by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh, is often mistakenly described as liberal; in fact, its primary goal was to defend Islam against Western hegemony. It aspired to offer a theological framework that would allow Muslims to be part of modernity without compromising their belief in the comprehensive essence of Islam.
The one thing these reformers never intended to do was to release society from the shackles of religious scriptures monopolized by religious establishments. And ironically enough, it is exactly because Afghani and Abduh's relatively modern and relatively tolerant school of thought became so influential - appeasing the minds of so many Muslims that religion can indeed encompass every aspect of modernity - that the Arab intellectual world is still locked in a spirit of taboo and fear.
Some 100 years ago, it was possible, although risky, for an Arab to doubt whether the Koran was a divine text. Any Arab who does so today would be signing his own death warrant. Sadly enough, many contemporary Western intellectuals also think twice before discussing Muslim creed. Where particular aspects of life, such as religion, cannot be openly debated, thorough scientific investigation is impossible.
Contemporary Arab religious scholars commonly offer apologias that attribute Western scientific achievements to the intellectual legacy an ungrateful West inherited from the Muslim world. By doing so, they shut their eyes to the deep historical context of Western renaissance. Contemporary leading Arab universities produce books and essays that depict Darwin, Freud, Marx and other brilliant modern minds as part of a Jewish conspiracy to bring about the downfall of humanity. By doing so, they distract their audiences from entire fields of scientific study.
Despite whatever racists imply, there is nothing essential about Muslims or Arabs that prevents them from winning Nobel Prizes. But for a scientific revolution to occur in these regions, more than political reform is needed. Rather, true intellectual freedom must be established. Since this is nowhere in sight, my hope - in fact, my guess - is that the first Muslim affiliated with a Middle Eastern university to win a Nobel Prize will be an Arab-Israeli. And he or she will teach Jews and Muslims alike a very valuable lesson.
The writer is director of Programs in Democracy at the Adelson Institute. This article was first published by the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies, at the Shalem Center,www.adelsoninstitute.orgThis article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1256799072254&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull 

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 Jews rank high among winners of Nobel, 

but why not Israelis?

SHULE KOPF  Friday October 25, 2002

...The first theory says that Jews are cleverer than others, a theory dismissed by Volkov and other serious academics.

The second theory, proposed first by an American sociologist in 1919, holds that because Jews were on the margins of society they were forced to excel.

The third and more common explanation, says Volkov, states that generations of Jewish Orthodox learning later translated brilliantly into secular learning.

"In fact, very often the Jewish learning tradition stood in the way of going into science, 

keeping some of the best minds in the yeshiva," says Volkov.

"We have autobiographies of scientists who talk about how difficult it was 

to break away from the Orthodox world."

 

The dramatic rise of the United States as a hothouse for Nobel Prizes following World War II is attributed partly to the large number of Jewish scientists who fled there to escape Nazism.

To date, counting Kahneman's prize for economics, Israel has won five Nobel Prizes: one for literature, by Agnon in 1966, and three for peace, with Menachem Begin in 1978 and Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in 1994.

That raises the question of why Israelis have not won Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry and medicine, areas in which Jews have traditionally excelled...
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/19170/edition_id/387/format/html/displaystory.html

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Einstein: Becoming a Freethinker and a Scientist
Freethought is a philosophical viewpoint that holds that beliefs should be formed on the basis of science and logical principles and not be comprised by authority, tradition, or any other dogma.
The cognitive application of freethought is known as freethinking, and practitioners of freethought are known as freethinkers. 

The following is an excerpt from Albert Einstein's Autobiographical Noteshttp://www.einsteinandreligion.com/freethink.htmlhttp://www.geniuslovebaby.com/prodigy/albert.html

When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of the hopes and strivings that chase most men restlessly through life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the case today. By the mere existence of his stomach everyone was condemned to participate in that chase. The stomach might well be satisfied by such participation, but not man insofar as he is a thinking and feeling being.

As the first way out there was religion, which is implanted into every child by way of the traditional education-machine. Thus I came - though the child of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents - to a deep religiousness, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve.

Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression.

Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment — an attitude that has never again left me, even though, later on, it has been tempered by a better insight into the causal connections.

It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the "merely personal," from an existence dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings. Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking.

The contemplation of this world beckoned as a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in its pursuit. The mental grasp of this extra-personal world within the frame of our capabilities presented itself to my mind, half consciously, half unconsciously, as a supreme goal. Similarly motivated men of the present and of the past, as well as the insights they had achieved, were the friends who could not be lost.

The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has shown itself reliable, and I have never regretted having chosen it.

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The religious kulturkampf

Maimonides

 

(who would doubtlessly be disqualified from teaching in a typical haredi school 

because of his secular education)  wrote in Mishna Torah,

 

"Whoever thinks he can study Torah and not work, and relies on charity, 

profanes God's name."

In addition, during these difficult times, graduates from haredi schools obliged to seek employment

 

are discovering that having been denied a secular education and lacking professional skills,

 

they are doomed to a life of poverty and reliance on welfare.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1246443729260&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull

Even students who succeeded

 

in the haredi school system

 

were unprepared to enter the labor market

http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid1246443758976&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull --------

Vishnitzer Chassidim in Bnei Brak

http://shearim.blogspot.com/2009_04_01_archive.html

Until the 1970s, the Bnei Brak municipality was headed by Religious Zionist mayors.^{[citation needed]} After Mayor Gottlieb of the National Religious Party was defeated, Haredi parties grew in status and influence; since then they have governed the city. As the Haredi population grew, the demand for public religious observance increased and more residents requested the closure of their neighbourhoods to vehicular traffic on the Shabbat. When they demanded the closure of a main street (HaShomer St. now Kahaneman St.), the non-religious residents protested but the town's religious inhabitants won the battle.^{[citation needed]} Since then, their influence in the city continuously grew.

In a short period of time most of Bnei Brak's secular and Religious Zionist residents migrated elsewhere, 

and the city has become almost homogeneously Haredi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnei_Brak 

Israeli Bible-Belt: 

The (ultra-religious, Jewish) city of Bnei Brak at the bottom of matriculation table list with a meager 15% pass rate - 

The northern Arab village of Fureidis passed with a pass rate of 75%

Kohav Yair tops matriculation table

Aug. 11, 2009
JPost.com Staff , THE JERUSALEM POST

The Education Ministry on Tuesday morning published a list of matriculation pass rates according to region for the past year.
For the third year running, Kohav Yair topped the table, with a pass rate of 82 percent. Tel Aviv was placed 23rd with a 68% rate, Haifa had a 63% rate and Beersheba got 55%.
The northern Arab village of Fureidis scored a major achievement, jumping 73 places to third, with a pass rate of 75%, one place below Shoham.
Sderot dropped 30 places, from 25th to 55th.
Bnei Brak was at the bottom of the list with a meager 15% pass rate.
The national average of the 144 cities and local authorities listed stands at 44%, and unsurprisingly, with the notable exception of Fureidis, there was a direct correlation between socioeconomic level and matriculation pass rates.
Army Radio said that the report aroused a anger in the haredi sector due to the fact that their communities were included on the list, even though in cities like Bnei Barak some 90% of students are in the religious education system and are not part of the Education Ministry curriculum. They said that the list doesn't reflect ability, and that many haredi students reach very high accomplishments in their religious studies and don't even learn for matriculation exams.

This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1249418574447&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull

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July 20, 2009

Haredi Poverty Rate Tops 60%

 

Last update - 15:07 20/07/2009

Bank of Israel Chief to ultra-Orthodox community: Get jobs

By Motti Bassok, TheMarker

Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer on Monday called on the heads of the ultra-Orthodox sector in Israel to promote employment among Haredi men and women in order to minimize the prevalent poverty among them.

During a conference for the ultra-Orthodox community in Jerusalem, Fischer said that the low employment rate among the Haredi men and women was the root cause of for the high incidence of poverty, higher than any other sector in Israeli society, including the notoriously poor Arab sector.

According to Fischer, 60 percent of the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel were defined as poor in 2008, and that number has only grown since. "There is an enormous pool of human resources in the Haredi sector, which, harnessed, could contribute another driving force for growth to the economy, while also minimizing the poverty," he said. 

Addressing the general financial situation in Israel, Fischer said that the economy is beginning to display signs of growth over recent months, with exports up in May and June and imports up during last month as well. The Bank of Israel combined index has risen for the first time in 11 months, he added.

"We have a strong economy, but unemployment is rising and there is also inflation in Israel," Fischer said. "Right now, we just don't know when the market will begin growing again." 

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1101543.html

http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/2009/07/haredi-poverty-rate-tops-60-234.html

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Taub Center report shows 

national-religious, secular education has shrunk over the last decade.

Haredi children in class (illustrative}
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski

Study: 48% of pupils are Arab, haredi

Aug. 30, 2009
Abe Selig , THE JERUSALEM POST

With the 2009-2010 school year set to begin this Tuesday, a new report released by an independent research institute shows that non-ultra-Orthodox Jews are rapidly becoming a minority in the country's education system, while the soon-to-be majority, Israeli Arab and haredi pupils, are receiving a level of education that is "considerably below Western standards".
Using recently published figures from the Education Ministry, the Taub Center for Social Policy Research, a socioeconomic research group based in Jerusalem, found that at the beginning of the decade, 39 percent of the country's pupils studied in either the Israeli Arab or ultra-Orthodox school systems.
Over the last decade however, preliminary findings from the group's annual survey show that the number of Israeli Arab pupils in the country grew by 10 percent while the number of ultra- Orthodox pupils grew by over five times as much, 51 percent.
In contrast, the study shows that the number of pupils in state-run religious schools grew by 8 percent while the total number of pupils in the largest group of schools - the non-religious state education system - actually decreased in size.
As a result, within the span of just one decade, 48 percent of the country's pupils now study in either the Israeli Arab or the ultra-Orthodox school system, and increase of nearly 10 percentage points. The remainder, which is currently 52 percent of the total - and falling annually, according to the study - are enrolled in either the state-run religious or state-run secular schools.
"In light of the rapidly changing demographics within Israel, the Taub Center concludes that it is vitally important for the country to begin focusing on what is being taught to the children who will be the majority population in a generation, and asks whether they are being given the basic skills to work in a modern economy and live in a modern society," a press release from the Taub Center said.
The Taub Center's Executive Director, Professor Dan Ben-David, said that at present, the answer to this question was an overwhelming "no".
Ben-David explained that a comparison with 25 countries from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), who participated in the 2006 Program from International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, which focused on some of the more important core subjects like math, science and reading, showed that the average achievements of Israel's non-ultra-Orthodox Jewish population were tied with the last place OECD country, while the achievement levels of Israel's Arab pupils were even worse.
"[The Israeli Arab pupils'] grades were 14 percent below the Israeli national average," he said. "And ultra-Orthodox pupils didn't even participate in the exams - no other country excluded such a large proportion of its population from the exams - and the [haredi schools] have no national core curriculum that is enforced."
The report goes on to show that one consequence of the evidence from the educational realm could be found in Israel's labor market, where employment rates for both groups are substantially below what is common in developed countries with correspondingly low average incomes.
"While other factors certainly contribute to the low employment rates, the role played by the education system has been considerable," the report states. "The quickness of the demographic changes that are taking place within Israel's education system and the level of education that is currently being provided to these two groups suggest a current default economic and social trajectory that will not be sustainable in the future."
"A government which does not dramatically improve Israel's educational system in the very near future, with substantial emphasis on improving the quality of education received by these two groups in particular, is letting the country edge ever closer to a point where it may no longer be possible to change direction - with all of the existential implications that this implies for the country," the report concludes.
"I knew that this was happening, but I had never really looked at like this," Ben-David said. "For me it was a real surprise to see how fast these changes were happening, and when you combine them with the level of education these groups are receiving, you have to ask, what kind of country is this going to be in a generation?"

This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1251145151803&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull

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