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Bordering the south of Tel Aviv, the city of Ramat Hasharon, with its 65,000 inhabitants, hosts one of the most famous schools in Israel. Founded in 1950, Hakfar Hayarok (in Hebrew means “Village Green”) was created to shelter poor children and children of immigrants who had recently landed in the country.
It was inspired by the model designed by Janusz Korczak, a Polish pedagogue of Jewish origin, who later made history for his role in the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto during Nazism. Deported to Treblinka, one of the concentration and extermination camps, he was murdered in August 1942.
Mikhail Frunze/Opera Mundi
Hakfar Hayarok is a mixed school and no longer require that students stay to sleep in their facilities
His educational philosophy was bold, in a conservative and authoritarian era. Korczak advocated that children should be treated with equality and respect, transforming schools in infant societies in which students would have their turn and their voice. He believed that they should be organized by combining education and full-time work, with students living in the dormitories of these establishments, which would also have houses for teachers and their families.
“When the school was created, Israel lived the heyday of the kibbutzim movement,” says Professor Ruth Fishbein, referring to the collective farms that proliferated at the time of the creation of the State of Israel. “The founders thought of creating a kind of children kibbutz with school and farm activities where children would have free education and housing.”
Contrary to what is common in the country, with Jewish students and Arab-Israeli separated into distinct systems, the Hakfar Hayrok is a mixed school. A quarter of its students belong to other ethnicities and religions. Many are foreigners. “We are an island of excellence, but inspired by humanistic ideas,” says Ruth. “Here we teach children to live in plurality and tolerance, to love their neighbor, to give more importance to peace than to land.”
Mikhail Frunze/Opera Mundi
The area of the college has dairy farm, several cafeterias and exclusive building for music classes and arts
With 1,700 students, the school has privileged facilities, including a dairy farm, sports courts, trail riding, spacious dining areas, a small zoo for teaching veterinary, and a building dedicated entirely to art and music lessons.
Crisis
Eight years ago, it ran the risk of being closed. A public property, it lost many resources with the continued budget cuts performed by the government. There were those who considered, at the Ministry of Education, the school expensive and outdated. Hakfar Hayrok was forced to reinvent itself.
The first step was to start charging a monthly fee relatively low, about $200 per student. It also leased part of its land to companies and the incoming rent started helping balance the budget. The students were no longer required to live at the school, a situation that currently applies to only about 20% of those enrolled. Finally, structures were created to attract students with talents and repertoires above average.
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“We went back to being a reference to the country by encouraging other schools to find ways to survive and maintain the quality of the system,” says Professor Ruth. “If we had not adopted these measures, we wouldn’t resist the budget cuts and the real estate pressure to incorporate our spaces into the residential or corporate market.”
Mikhail Frunze/Opera Mundi
Israel maintains a high standard of teaching and invests heavily in human capital formation. A research by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 2012, placed the country second in the ranking of the most educated nations in the world, with 46% of its adult population with higher education, only behind Canada.
[Professor Ruth in front of the image of Janusz Korczak]
Its good performance goes beyond the university. The country occupies the 17th place in the average amount of time students spend studying, one of the items that make up the Human Development Index, prepared by the United Nations. But the system has witnessed a decrease in its budget share in relation to the GDP.
In the 80’s, the annual public spending on education was equivalent to 8.6% of everything produced by the economy. It suffered a drastic cut in the next decade, to 6.1%, when the government of national unity (formed both by the Labour Party and the conservatives) implanted deep liberal reforms. Remained at that level until the end of the first decade of the century, to fall below 6% in the last four years.
Since the overall production (basis of the calculation) grew significantly, the absolute funding was not reduced, unless between 1985 and 1995, but the system has been partially privatized, and the top schools of the public system lost its gratuity, such as the Hakfar Hayarok.
Another important factor is the decline in total spending per student, which has 78% of its origin in public funds and 22% in private funds. If the reduction in primary and secondary education was not very relevant – respectively from 20.50% and 21.88% of the GDP per capita in 1999 to 19.46% and 20.40% in 2010, according to the World Bank – at the university level, the numbers are strong: a dip from 30.93% to 21.28%.
Some consequences of these cuts are severe. Teachers complain of flattening wages, the classrooms are more numerous, the quality of education has dropped, according to different valuations. One test, organized by the OECD in 2007, placed the Israeli high school students in the penultimate position among the 40 richest countries, regarding their knowledge of mathematics.
Mikhail Frunze/Opera Mundi
OECD ranking puts Israel as the second most educated country in the world, only behind Canada
Beside any problems caused by the decrease in educational funding, Israel faces a peculiar question, referring to the ties of religion and the state. In addition to the regular public schools, in which most of the students are enrolled, the government supports a network of official institutions dedicated to study of the Bible (for Orthodox families) and subsidizes the independent educational establishments of the ultra-Orthodox.
These schools, the Chinuch Atzmai, which teach 80,000 students, need to apply only 55% of the official curriculum and devote themselves almost exclusively to the teaching of the Torah. After a debate that lasted decades, the government approved on May 15 a measure which requires these establishments’ students to pass exams and achieve a certain level of general knowledge, at the risk of losing the official grant.
“The strength of this country is education,” says Ruth Fisbein. “But we live in a period of much effort, made by educators and schools as Hakfar Hayarok to defend our pedagogical values and preserve good quality education as a universal right of Israelis.”
Translation: Kelly Cristina Spinelli