Back to School

It has been a very busy couple of weeks, all leading up to today, when all three boys in the family (Eshy, Aviv, and yours truly) had their first day of school in Israel.

Eshy started kitah aleph (first grade), Aviv started Gan (nursery school), and at the Hartman Institute we had the first orientation day for the new cohort of students.

Eshy's and Aviv's stories are the most interesting of the three.  Eshy is going to a school called Yachad, and it's (so we understand) a genuinely pluralist school, with religious, secular, and in-betweens, all in the same school.  This is extremely rare in Israel.  One of the only other similar models is a school called Keshet, in Jerusalem, but that isn't really pluralist, it's what I call dualist: you have to choose to be either "dati" (religious) or "chiloni" (secular).  For those of us who are in the middle somewhere, or who are religious-but-open, or religious-egalitarian, there's no place in a school like Keshet.  We hope that at Yachad, there will be.

Yachad has a gan program but we couldn't get Aviv in (it was only by a minor miracle that Eshy got in to kitah aleph, and that was only at the last moment).  So Aviv is going to a local religious gan.  We went to a parents' evening there last week to meet the ganenet (gan teacher) and other parents.  Well, I thought that American parents were uptight, but I've never seen anything like this.  These people were crazy!  Imagine a vociferous and raucous debate in the Knesset about the peace process, with left-wingers and right-wingers screaming blue murder at each other for destroying the Jewish people and suchlike.  Now imagine that kind of screaming blue murder transposed into a group of parents sitting on little kindergarten chairs around little kindergarten tables so that your knees are in your cheeks, with pictures of toy trains on the walls and wooden building blocks in the corner, and all these parents with their knees in their cheeks are screaming about snack time being at 10.30 whereas last year it was at 10.00.

Maybe there is a large segment of the population here with congenital hearing defects, and that is why everyone shouts the whole time.  Has this been investigated?