When Alexander the Great conquered Palestine, he arrived at the seashore, where he found the philosopher Diogenes gazing out toward the horizon. Standing before Diogenes grandly, he asked, "How can Alexander the Great be of assistance to the great philosopher?" Diogenes responded: "You can move. You're blocking the sun."

That same sun that is being blocked today by many great and wise people, who claim that they possess the key to changing the face of Israeli education: government officials, architects of complex reform plans, learned professors, Education Ministry inspectors, local government heads, NGO staff and others. As a result of being pulled in so many directions, toward so many "new horizons," the education cart is at risk of being split apart.

What the education system needs is, first and foremost, the same thing that Diogenes requested of Alexander: for the sun that gives it nourishment not to be blocked. Which is to say, we have to remind ourselves of the real fundamentals of education - of the roots that feed the tree of learning.

If we determine that the essence of education derives from the encounter between young people and more mature people, we can understand that the educational personality may be the decisive factor in the process. It's the teachers, then, who are the sun that is being blocked from the students, who, like old Diogenes, are trying to gaze at the horizon. A teacher endowed with both knowledge and intellectual curiosity, a world of developed concepts and contexts, a high level of sensitivity to educational opportunities, and developed instructional skills - it is he or she who constitutes the axis upon which the entire teaching process revolves. Without teachers who fit this description, there's not much chance of effecting a significant change in the educational system.

If this change is not taking place, it's not for lack of understanding of the problem, but rather because the decision makers are fettered by outdated labor agreements. These collective agreements attract to the field an academic cohort with the lowest level of skills or other personal limitations.

Those teachers who do come to the field out of a principled choice inevitably find themselves burned out, caught between the high standards they hold for themselves, the mediocre performance of many of their colleagues and, above all, the fact that they are compensated materially at a level far below what they deserve.

What do those talented people, whom the educational system fails to attract in the first place, end up doing with themselves? They find other means of supporting themselves, or they turn to private education, where they encounter unhappy parents who are themselves seeking alternatives - a search not necessarily connected to a desire for educational quality, but in some cases to the wish to separate their children from other classes or ethnic groups.

It can be said unconditionally that the public school system is not going to take off and become competitive if it is unable to attract human resources from a higher segment of the labor market. Reduction of class size, innovative curricula and extra classroom hours - all of these are positive contributions, but they won't do the trick if not accompanied by teachers who inspire. Talented people can stimulate pupils in a way that makes learning pleasurable in its own right, and can develop curiosity that sends young people off to learn about things that interest them on their own.

The most important role that the public education system can play in all this is to balance the need for strengthening those local school systems that are short on material resources with the need to compensate those that are unable to attract high-quality personnel. In this way, it will return to being a public system in the sense of real affirmative action.

A second element that is vital if we are to revive the system is to change the way we evaluate and measure educational achievement. The current system, which emphasizes how to succeed in tests by superficial acquisition of knowledge that often evaporates once the test booklet is closed, puts the entire teaching process in thrall to a need to "cover material." The result of this is that many pupils end up not having developed any high-level thinking skills.

Making these two necessary changes demands a level of courage that does not exist today, in either the political echelon or the administrative one. The public, too, is left either complaining, in the best case, or being caught up in an escapist fantasy, in less good cases (somewhere off in the Caribbean, watching groups of young men and women "surviving" by virtue of their physical strength or the sense of cunning they have developed).

If we think back to the most significant experience we underwent during our own years in the educational system, inevitably we recall a one-time encounter with a unique individual. These critical meetings, from which we emerge as changed people, are the events that can shape our lives - the sunlight that can illuminate our way. These are the essential experiences of education.

Mendi Rabinovitch is the principal of Hadassah Neurim High School, near Netanya, and head of a task force of graduates of the Mandel Institute for Educational Leadership who are working to change the model for matriculation exams.

Source: haaretz.com