Dr. Jonathan Woocher at the Education Summit: Looking Back and Moving Forward

In Dr. Jonathan Woocher’s talk at the Education Summit at URJ Biennial yesterday: Jewish Education is Dead. Long Live Jewish Education, he discussed what has changed and what is staying the same in Jewish education. He got us thinking with this short video from the New Brunswick, Canada school system.  As a parent, I found myself tearing up. When the world is changing so fast, how can you prepare your children for it? What kind of a world will it be? But as he continued, a lot of what Dr. Woocher said comforted me. 

His commentary on the above video was that “education is about adapting to a changing world.” This is what education, and parenting, has always been about. This is what we mean when we say we want to raise resilient children. We know our children will face old and new challenges, or old challenges with new faces, and our job is to prepare them to trust their judgment and learn from their experiences.

What else hasn’t changed? Dr. Woocher explained that at our core, we are motivated by 1) a search for meaning and purpose, 2) a desire for connections and relationships, and 3) satisfaction from accomplishment and growth. I was reminded of Dr. Hallowell’s message about raising happy people: Relationships and connectedness are key. Children need time to figure out what matters to them. They need to try things and succeed, building on that cycle of challenge and mastery. Even if the medium is different, these are the things I need to focus on as a parent for my children, my family and myself.

Towards the end, Dr. Woocher talked about what gets in the way of us moving forward. This was the message I’ll take most to heart. He warned that we need to overcome our desire to control. Rather than trying to recreate our values, attitudes and practices, we need to help the next generation find theirs. This is one thing when we are talking about Jewish community, but it gets right to the heart of parenting. I thought of a liberal friend of mine, who had a revelation in the course of her pregnancy. “What if it’s a republican?!” she said, looking at me in fear. As Dr. Wendy Mogel reminds us in her podcast, “The Singing Test,” we should try to think of our children as “a seed that came in a packet without a label.” Our job is to “give them sufficient food and water, and pull the really big weeds, and wait to see what God has given you.” One colleague I approached after the talk told me, “Your children will always know more than you do.” Frightening? Liberating? In any case, it’s a real joy to experience the adventure of getting to know them as they grow.