1st grade on the farm

This morning, as my youngest child starts first grade, I am doing what perhaps I should have done long ago: I’m taking my child to the farm. She will be spending her school days at the Ecological Farm in Modiin, the first class in a fledgling experimental school called “Maayan,” literally, “spring.”

There, in a house made of clay and recycled materials in which the toilets do not flush but its contents are re-entered into the ground, where a goat my daughter fell in love with named Maya gave birth last year to twins “Rami” and “Levi”, where the surrounding sounds are not of cars honking and teachers yelling but of mules, chickens and dogs communicating, where young adults come from all over Israel to work as organic farmers – this is where my five-year-old child is beginning her formal schooling.

To be sure, this is risky. There are only five kids her age there, and another seven a year below – 10 boys and two girls. There is no book list, no strict schedule, no list of rules on the wall or even a blackboard, and actually, I don’t event think there is a clock in the room. I’m not sure exactly what she will be learning, plans are fuzzy and flexible, and everyone is just “okay” with whatever comes.

Some of the “shin-shinim”, gap-year Israelis who are taking a year off before their army service to volunteer at the farm, are quite encouraging, while others seem to have been transplanted here from 1968 Berkeley, California. It’s a bit scary to be taking such a gamble with my daughter’s future. Yet, every aspect of uncertainty is also incredible liberation — and divine possibility.

Learning should be natural. So much of what goes on in the educational system is artificial, forced, created for bureaucratic reasons rather than with a profound vision of human development. Everything, I believe, can be learned from life and nature, if properly harnessed. A project such as planting vegetables, for example, can teach science, and math, and codes of discipline and patience – and can inspire kids to want to read, to look up more information in encyclopedias or the Internet.

It can also be a forum for teaching history, and tanach, as kids explore ways in which people lived and grew food over generations. The environment can even teach art – as in Geraldine Brooks’ marvelous People of the Book, in which she imagined the astounding young artist of the Sarajevo Haggada learning her trade from having sketched plants as a child. Kids – humans, really – have natural curiosity and creative energy, and when these are supported and harnessed, anything is possible.

Of course, I do not know for sure that this is what will go on in Maayan, and if it does, it will only be as a result of parents’ hard work, investment, meetings, and volunteering. The truth is, the knowledge that I’m going to have to take an active part in this school in order to make it work almost made me not send her there. After over a decade of being a school parent, I’ve become quite jaded. I have come to truly dread getting involved. I’ve been on the “vaad horim”, the parent committee, enough times to know that parents are mostly seen by schools as a convenient ATM.

Two years ago, we were asked to pay an extra 900 NIS (about $240) for “miscellaneous” (paper goods, presents for the teachers, and God knows what else). I’ve been given lists upon lists of what to buy and where to show up and what to teach my children. (Parents of girls are expected to bake cake for Shabbat and parents of boys buy the grape juice.) Plus, parents are often surrogate teachers.

I’ve begged my kids’ teachers over and over to give less homework, to make fewer demands on family life and fewer assumptions about what parents are capable of (Hebrew grammar, for example, not being my strong suit.) I actually once got called into the principal’s office in Yachad for asking the English teacher to give less homework. I’m not kidding.

Last year, we received notice in late June that we had to prepare our kids for a Hebrew grammar exam to be held on September 3. Why bother having a teacher, I wonder? So yes, as a parent, I’ve done enough baking, shopping, shlepping, and sitting over someone else’s idea of homework to make me never want to step into a school again. The idea of having to be “invested” in a school almost kept me away. Been there, done that, had enough.

Youthful optimism

But Maayan has started to stir something in me, a latent vision of my child’s education that has been so suppressed that I almost forgot it was there. For the first time ever, the school has asked me not what I can buy but what I can teach. Last year, during the pilot year when it was just a pre-school, one of the mothers who is a midwife gave the kids lessons on anatomy. My daughter learned so much during that one hour that she often taught me new things about the human body. I’ve started to think about what I want to teach my child, really.

I’m considering going in and doing some Torah with art and music. How fun would that be! I’m trying to convince my husband, our resident green thumb, to do the veggie patch. The possibilities are endless. Sure, it’s hard work, and I have to make time, which is not so easy. But I’m pretty sure that this is the way education is supposed to be.

Mostly, I feel like this is a place where my child will be allowed to grow freely, into herself, and not into a cookie-cutter Education-Ministry mold. At the school orientation yesterday, the kids were asked to bring t-shirts, which they cut and knotted and turned into school bags. It was a lovely project. The kids were given markers and paints and they freely decorated these bags, however they wanted.

It reminded me of an experience I had when my oldest child was in first grade in a “regular” school. She came home one day with a piece of canvas, which was to cover her first siddur. Excitedly, I bought some material markers and gave them to her and let her have a go based on her own artistic vision. But when we brought it to school for the siddur party, we discovered that all the other siddur covers were decorated not in six-year-old freeform but in fancy mother-made embroidery. My daughter’s siddur stood out on the shelf as the “messy” one – and the only actually made by the child. It’s such a sad situation when a child has to feel embarrassed for being herself.

Now, 10 years later, as I share a moment with the teacher who encourages my child to paint as her heart desires, I feel like I’m coming full circle, my youthful optimism as a parent returning in its passion. I’m hopeful that here, education in its purest, most potent form, may be truly taking place.

Here’s to the New Year!

Elana Maryles Sztokman is a writer, researcher and educator, and blogs at www.elanasztokman.com . For more information about Maayan, go to http://sites.google.com/site/beitchinuchmodiin/