The Ashkenazi Revolution

257Hebrew education in the State of Israel is based upon false foundations.The best education is that of religious Jewry, especially its extremist sects.Religious education has a clear, and innocent, human goal: To educateobservant Jews and sons who are faithful to the God of Israel. A goodeducation, though on a limited scale, was the kibbutz education that placed,as its goal, the establishment of a generation that would continue theKibbutz movement. The goals of general Hebrew education have alwaysbeen unclear. The average product of this general education would not beshocked if all of the Zionist aspirations were realized in a small canton onthe banks of the Yarkon River. Graduates of the Hebrew gymnasiums,during British rule, felt no obligation to settle as pioneers, or to join one ofthe underground movements. The great majority of them worried aboutthemselves and turned to easy livelihoods. A particular youth movement,“The Immigrants Camps”, made its goal to work among these graduates, toeducate them anew, and to inculcate in them the ideals of the Labormovement. General Hebrew education, in the pre-state era, imposed, uponits wards, no clear and explicit commandments, and no absoluteimperatives regarding the territory of the Land of Israel, its political fate orthe dimensions of the realization of Zionism. It had only one singleimperative: The Hebrew language and its literature. With the aid of craftytricks, the Hebrew educational system eliminated, from the Bible, the Godof Israel, and replaced Him with the New Hebrew Literature and its heroes.They then used the Biblical method, and Biblical zeal, to impose upon thepupil the new deity. The Hebrew school, in the era of the State of Israel,remained fundamentally as it was during British rule. The statehood that itgranted its pupils is luke warm indeed, and its primary campaign is to turnits pupils into slaves of the New Hebrew Literature and its heroes.At the end of his studies, it becomes clear to the perceptive pupil that hehas been deceived and taken for an empty vessel, since he had gained noideas or visions from school except the words and idolatries of authors.But this discovery comes too late, and all that remains for the young nativeIsraeli is to distance himself from the classicists of the New HebrewLiterature, and to spice his speech with slang which proves that he has casttheir yoke from his shoulders.