It took a government bureaucracy and the bosses of regressive teachers unions to nearly ruin education among a people traditionally so committed to and excellent at it. Although Israel spends at least as much as rich Western nations on education, our college students nonetheless have poor language skills, our high-school scores in mathematics and foreign languages are dismal, and learning is increasingly disrupted by violence. The system claims to deliver “free education” but in fact parents not only pay, they pay twice: High taxes pay for a bloated educational bureaucracy while poor teaching and costly fees pay for supplementary “gray education.”

The recently published Dovrat Commission report attempts to solve these problems largely by administrative and technical measures. It recommends that the education system be reorganized and decentralized, giving school principals authority and a budget to run their school; that regional education authorities assure core curriculum and performance, and that the Ministry of Education be shrunk so it can focus on policy and monitoring achievements. Students will study five full days (8am to 4pm), and teachers will work on a full schedule so that fewer are needed and those that remain are better compensated (NIS 5,000 for beginners). Principals will be rewarded for their enhanced role as managers with authority and responsibility by a monthly salary of up to NIS 30,000. If the plan manages to survive the objections of the teacher unions, other vested interests and their powerful political supporters, it will offer some relief from problems created by the heavily bureaucratized and centralized system.

But I doubt that a merely administrative and technical reform can really save a system whose failure is rooted in objectives and ethos. The Dovrat Commission defines education’s overarching objectives as closing the social gap, enhancing student performance and the school environment, imparting life skills, curbing anti-social behavior, cultivating values and tradition, advancing teachers’ professionalism and status, fighting absenteeism and dropouts, and maximizing the use of resources. This is a grab bag of problems plaguing the system, rather than a coherent and prioritized list of objectives, and it contains several internal contradictions: “Closing the social gap” is usually a euphemism for devising a sort of homogenized educational pablum that curbs the competition that leads to better student performance. Even worse, the list contains items that confuse education with the worst kind of failed social engineering.

Experience in Israel and abroad indicates that huge expenditures of money and effort on enforced “integration” and “affirmative action” have not been effective in closing gaps, while spontaneous economic growth was. Despite high transfer payments (amounting now to about one-third of the budget), income disparities between Ashkenazim and Sephardim have kept growing, except among independent wage earners, where Sephardim rapidly overtook Ashkenazim. Educated Ashkenazim initially occupied most (especially top) public sector jobs where protekzia – patronage – excluded even educated Sephardim. So ambitious Sephardim were pushed into the small-business sector. The post-1967 economic prosperity made their small enterprises lucrative (especially the underground economy ones that avoided draconian taxes). Sephardi parents could subsequently afford to send their children to study abroad, especially in professions like law, where local faculties tended to select the children of well-established Ashkenazim for study and advancement.

A thriving economy has provided, then, a spontaneous (it was not engineered or imposed) “affirmative action” for the Sephardim, rewarding the trading skills that they preserved and that the Ashkenazim suppressed during years of socialist indoctrination. The same process occurred in the 1990s among educated Arabs. Discriminated against by the public sector, they moved into private business and many did exceedingly well. All experience from other nations shows that students from disadvantaged backgrounds who receive good basic educational skills are able to advance. So why saddle the education system with an extremely costly mission that it cannot really accomplish directly? Why do so at the expense of what education can do well – provide all students with life skills that can best help them close gaps by themselves?

But alas, the commission says too little about the provision of those basic skills. It ignores the fact that schools fail to teach how to think and write clearly, organize a meeting, set an agenda and move motions, or how to master basic office skills (e.g., how to address an envelope or file material).

More crucially, Dovrat seems oblivious to the basic problem that from elementary school on, our educational system – staffed often by leftists – is inculcating an anti-enterprise, anti-capitalist ethos in economic matters. It fosters a reliance on government, and favors avoidance of individual responsibility.

Israelis entertain an anti-bourgeois mindset promoting a “pornographic” attitude toward money and success (because these supposedly represent “exploitation”). They also oppose other bourgeois virtues such as respect for tradition and for the authority of experience and learning, for hard work, discipline, punctuality, and certain social norms such as politeness and proper attire.

Without the family and the education system inculcating these virtues, and without an economic system that rewards them, the profound change needed to reform education will not materialize. The Dovrat recommendations alone may have a limited salutary effect. But we can do better.

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