Beyond the Age of Mitzvah

Congregations often ask what can be done to encourage students to stay enrolled in religious school after they have become b'nai mitzvah.

By the time the question is being asked, it may be too late for the current group of students. I genuinely believe that the single most important thing is to instill excitement in Jewish learning while students are young. It's been said that nearly everything students know after bar/bat mitzvah was learned in third grade or earlier. If that's true, and if we make students attend school for four more years anyway, it is no wonder that they don't see any reason to continue attending through high school. Why stay in school if there is nothing to learn after third grade anyway?

In other words, I think that it is important to have sufficient verticality. A lot of what we do in supplementary school comes across as "same old, same old": we study the holidays and Shabbat every single year, and students don't always learn in greater depth. Students need a sense of progress, of learning material that is new and more complex than what they learned the year before.

Beyond that, there's one very important factor in persistence that we can usually do nothing about: tradition. If a congregation has a tradition of persistence beyond b'nai mitzvah -- for example, a Reform congregation that has emphasized confirmation since sometime in the nineteenth century -- high-school enrollment will probably be good. It is much harder in congregations that have no tradition of high-school enrollment (including, by the way, many suburban Reform congregations founded in the past 40 years).

Nevertheless, there are some things we can do:

• Teach things that are worth learning. Although there is a place for "light" courses, if the entire curriculum consists of crafts and cooking, the overall effect will be negative.


• Teach at the appropriate level. Eighth and ninth grades shouldn't seem like a rehash of seventh grade, nor should they seem like college courses.


• Give students a choice. Include elective courses -- a combination of core and elective courses is best -- or, if electives aren't feasible, solicit student input about course topics.
  


• Include a (small) social component. School is school, but part of the motivation to attend is to spend time with friends.
  


• Work with parents. Since friends' participation is so influential, consider fomenting the kind of conspiracy that Joel Grishaver recommends: a secret agreement among parents not to let their child be the first to drop out.
  


• Especially if confirmation is not well-established in your congregation, consider emphasizing high-school graduation (at the end of grade 12) rather than pushing confirmation (after grade 10 or 11). It's more resonant in American culture.