I Accuse the Israeli Education System

Zola's letter had the merit of naming the accused and the charges in plain sentences, and I will borrow the form. This is not an analysis and it does not pretend to balance. It is a list of charges against the system that educated me and is now educating my children.

I accuse it of the following.

Of Teaching Identity Before Method

I accuse the system of deciding, before a child can read, which tribe the child belongs to, and of building a separate school stream for each tribe so that the decision is never revisited.

Secular, religious, ultra-Orthodox, Arab: four systems, four curricula, four sets of teachers, and children who will reach adulthood without ever having sat in a classroom with a member of another stream. Whatever else this arrangement achieves, it guarantees that the first thing every child learns is who we are, and that the answer is delivered by the state before any tool for evaluating such answers has been supplied. A system that wanted thinking citizens would teach the tools first and let the identity be examined afterwards. This system does the reverse, deliberately, and calls it pluralism.

Of Rewarding Memory and Calling It Achievement

I accuse the matriculation system of measuring the wrong thing and of shaping twelve years of schooling around the measurement.

The exams reward the ability to reproduce material under time pressure. Schools, rationally, teach to the exams. So the years that could have been spent learning to think are spent learning to retain, and the students who emerge with the highest scores are the ones with the best memories and the most patient tutors, which is a fact about them, not about their education. I have set out elsewhere what a curriculum should contain; almost none of it can be tested by asking a student to recall it, and so almost none of it is taught.

Of Teaching Everything Except How to Know

I accuse the system of graduating students who have been given thousands of facts and no method for deciding which of them are true.

Epistemology, the question of how we know what we know, does not appear anywhere in twelve years. Neither does statistics in any form that would let a citizen read a newspaper critically, nor the study of cognitive bias, nor the elementary observation that authorities disagree and that one needs a procedure for that case. A graduate can solve a quadratic and recite the causes of a war and has never once been asked how would you check that?

This omission is not an oversight. A population trained to ask how it knows is a population that asks the question of its rabbis, its politicians, and its generals, and none of those groups has lobbied for the subject.

Of Teaching Geometry as a Picture of the World

I accuse the system of spending years on Euclid and none on distributions, and of thereby teaching a false lesson about the shape of reality.

A child who spends years proving that things follow necessarily from axioms acquires the belief that the world is like that: clean rules, no exceptions, certainty available to anyone who reasons carefully. Reality, especially social reality, is statistical. It has exceptions everywhere, regularities that hold on average and fail in the particular, and confidence that must be earned and stated. A student who has never met a distribution has been taught to expect a world that does not exist, and will spend adult life being surprised by the one that does.

Of Teaching Ideology and Calling It History

I accuse the system of teaching the national story as settled fact and of treating the questioning of it as a failure of loyalty rather than a success of education.

History as taught is a story with a moral, and the moral is known in advance. The evidence that historians and archaeologists have accumulated against parts of the story is available to any adult who looks, and is not in the curriculum. The point is not which version is right. The point is that a system that teaches one version as fact and omits the existence of the argument is not teaching history. It is teaching a catechism and using the word history as a disguise.

Of Wasting the Years

I accuse the system, finally, of the crime that contains the others: it takes the twelve years in which a human being is most able to learn how to think, and it spends them on something else.

The something else is not worthless. Children learn to read, to calculate, to sit still, to be one of a group. But those are the achievements of the first few years, and the remaining ones are filled with content chosen because it can be examined, delivered by a method chosen because it produces obedience, in streams chosen because they preserve the tribes. A child who leaves this system thinking clearly did it in spite of the system, at home or alone, and knows it.

What I Do Not Accuse

I do not accuse the teachers, most of whom know all of this and are as trapped by the exams and the streams as the students are. I do not accuse the parents, who have no alternative on offer. I do not claim the system is worse than its neighbours; I do not know, and it is not the comparison that matters.

I accuse the design. It was built to produce a certain kind of citizen, and it produces that citizen reliably, and the citizen it produces is not one who was ever taught how to find out whether what he was told is true. That was a choice, and it is being made again every September.