As the mother of three boys, I appreciate the irony in suggesting that my kids could possibly benefit from having their eyes permanently locked onto screens and their thumbs flashing furiously across tiny keyboards. “Screens off” is a shout heard often in our house (shouted by me, of course). But social media aren’t all bad….
Rabbi Owen Gottlieb believes that the future of Jewish education is in games — both video and analog, like card and board games. Gottlieb, 38, is a doctoral candidate in education and Jewish studies at New York University and is the director and founder of ConverJent, which designs and develops games for Jewish learning and…
After finishing my first year of college and returning home happily to see my family and friends, I have been thinking about the level of education given at the university level and the preparation that secondary schooling gives in the United States. The result: we need to change the way we educate children in our…
A new study on anti-Semitism, commissioned by the German Parliament, came to the distressing, widely publicized conclusion that 20% of Germans are “latent” anti-Semites. But buried deep in the report is an assertion that might be even more troubling: Holocaust education is inadvertently fueling German anti-Semitism, making it worse. The study concluded that “anti-Semitic stereotypes…
In an earlier post I touched upon the subject of education, writing that Russian Jews of a certain age often view college as a pressure cooker for liberal propaganda. I find that, in addition to this one-sided view, many Russian Jews both old and young approach the term “liberal arts” with general skepticism, if not…
In the early days of Princeton Review, when roughly half of the test prep company’s employees were Jewish, it was often Jews vs. goyim in the annual football game. “They were taller, but we were faster,” said John Katzman, co-founder with Adam Robinson. Katzman also recalled “Talmudic” discussions on how to schedule tutoring sessions around…
The enemy, Sami Adwan believes, “is the person whose story you haven’t heard.” So, together with his American colleague, Robert Vogel, he has embarked on a mission to make sure Israeli and Palestinian school children hear each other’s stories. Adwan, a professor of education from Bethlehem University, and Vogel, from Philadelphia’s La Salle University, are…
Toward the end of his life, Apple’s visionary leader, Steve Jobs, was visited by another computer innovator, Microsoft’s Bill Gates. The conversation turned to the future of education. As related in Walter Isaacson’s recent biography of Jobs, both men agreed that computers had made surprisingly little impact on schools. “Computers and mobile devices would have…
100% of profits support our journalism
