A Curious Result
With the re-opening of Israel following the Coronavirus pandemic, many areas of life have changed. The pandemic impacted the field of education significantly. “With families kept at home under the COVID-19 restrictions and parents suddenly finding themselves responsible for the schooling-or unschooling -of their kids, the pandemic has caused turmoil and hassle in many households, in Israel and abroad. However, the giant social experiment of home schooling on a national scale-now possibly drawing to an end as schools begin to reopen-has allowed for some insights, too.”
One of those insights is a forced evaluation of the Israeli educational system. Reut Neor, who is responsible for educational innovations in 107 schools countrywide in the AMIT network, explains: “We have long been talking about an individual approach to students. Some kids learn easily in the morning, for example, while others learn better in the evening…The learning process can be very different from how it looks now in a regular school. The coronavirus has let us see it happen. We were taken directly into the future-the future of education, among other things-and we needed to face it.”
Homeschooling parents see a great benefit to the forced learning at home experience, as home education mother Efrat Campagnano observed, “Many of the parents start asking themselves questions about their role as a parent, and about whether they need school. I am not saying that all of them will choose to homeschool, and this is not the point! The point is to start thinking. Now that you have had a taste of an alternative, the choice will be more conscious.”
“In the new reality, many of the educators who urged reform of the school system found that the pandemic is changing it-without asking anyone.”
(Source: Anna Rudnitsky, The Times of Israel)
