“For anyone who still doesn’t understand why I’m ‘obsessive’ about revolutionizing math, English and science education, these are the results of the international PISA [Program for International Student Assessment] test conducted two years ago, before I took office,” wrote Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett on his Facebook page Dec. 7. This so-called obsession is apparently a direct boost to the campaign he launched upon taking office to encourage expanded math studies in high school. “We will not ease up. This is vital for us,” the leader of the HaBayit HaYehudi Party pledged in his post.
He appended to his latest post a report reflecting the dismal state of the Israeli education system as measured by the PISA, which tests 10th-graders in 72 countries in math, science and reading. Israel scored lower than average among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), receiving 467 points as opposed to the OECD average of 493. The gap between Israeli students who excelled at the test and those who encountered difficulties was one of the widest in the world, and the widest among the OECD states.
It wouldn’t be fair to blame the low test scores on the education minister, who took office less than two years ago. This is the grim result of an education system consistently bled dry so that budgets can be funneled instead to defense expenditures, settlements, yeshivas and more. This is the result of the chronic erosion in the standing of teachers and their low pay, along with the increase in poverty and the deepening gap between rich and poor. But since the day he took office, Bennett’s “obsessiveness” has undergone a sea change. It currently targets a somewhat different profession than the one supposed to train the coming generation of scientists, mathematicians and critical-thinking researchers.
On Sept. 13, over a year after he announced a “revolution” in math instruction, Bennett declared that “studying Judaism and excelling in the subject is more important in my view than the study of math and sciences. … We have to be a spiritual world power and to export spiritual knowledge to the whole world. This is the next chapter of our Zionist vision. This is how we will once again be a light unto nations. Because out of Zion shall come Torah and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem (Isaiah 2:3).”
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