“My role has changed over the past year. As the head of such a large system, I rarely need to engage at the micro level. I mainly deal with macro issues – processes, policies and thinking one, two, four years ahead.
But over the last few months, I’ve found myself dealing only with today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow – at most a week from now. And I’ve been exposed to a lot of small details that policymakers usually aren’t familiar with on a day-to-day basis. But when you take a moment to pause, when you look at individuals and hear their stories, you truly understand the meaning of education, and why we say that education is ‘tikkun olam’ – a step toward repairing the world.
This period has convinced me that we must allow school principals more authority. That they are the ones with the knowledge and understanding, and that the role of local authorities should be to enable them to take action. It has become clear to me how important it is for a government ministry to be responsible for oversight, rather than serving as an executive body, an oversight body and a development body. It cannot be everything at once.
In every school we go into now, we see children studying in places they have never studied before. On the roof in the schoolyard and in the hallways outside. We tell the principals to treat the children’s time in school like gold. At home they can do whatever is possible through remote learning; at school you should hold discussions, have conversations, and do the things that require the accompaniment of an adult.
The whole approach to teaching and learning has gotten a boost of creativity, as we seek to get the most out of the children during a period when they aren’t coming to school every day. There’s something about breaking up the routine, about the disruption, that is so good for the system. The system has needed this disruption for a long time.
Now we need to work on how to maintain it, and this is the top priority.
My new slogan is: how not to go back to February 2020. Assuming that by February 2021 all children will already be back in the school system, it cannot be the way it was in February 2020. Instead, it should be more like September 2020, which was diverse, creative, outdoors. It was up, down, sideways, conducted from home, hybrid. Full of engagement with nature, playfulness, lots of independent study for the kids – an activity to which teachers don’t always attach enough importance.
So that’s our job now. To not go back to February 2020. And I can’t do it alone; it’s not something a municipality can do alone. This is the role of the government.
What will it look like? I think it’s important to have remote learning one day a week for post-primary education. Four days a week spent physically at school and one day learning from home. This is so that children will miss going to school, and also so that they will practice independent learning. One of the things we learned during the pandemic was the extent to which children are not equipped to learn on their own.
Such a change would jumpstart the education system and save contact hours. During this time, children could study from home asynchronously, and these hours would be devoted to teacher learning.
To this end, we need to add smaller class sizes; and if some of the children are studying from home, this is possible. We will also need to reduce the number of subjects, since it’s not possible to study 15 subjects a week if you take one school day out.
Principals being flexible enough to build changing systems, a reduction in the number of subjects due to less time in school, and sanctifying the ‘golden hours’ which are physically spent in school. If we can hold on to these changes, we will have changed the system – and I will forever say ‘thank you’ to my beloved coronavirus.”