The child who does not know how to ask

Tractate Avot of the Mishnah specifies this curriculum for Jewish students (boys only):

• At the age of 5, a boy studies mikra (Scripture).
• At the age of 10, Mishnah.
• At the age of 13 he becomes a bar mitzvah.
• At the age of 15, he begins to study Gemara.
• At 18 he marries.
• At 20 (if not destined to become a scholar) he should get a job.

Although modern society disagrees with much of this—the lack of equivalent education for girls, the absence of secular learning, the assumption that studying the Talmud is the goal of all Jewish education—elements of it are still present in Jewish schools.

For example, we certainly teach stories from the Tanakh in kindergarten and first grade, and many Jewish day schools introduce the Mishnah in the fifth grade.

In general, however, religious-school curricula reflect modern beliefs about education. Many of these stem from the pragmatism of John Dewey in the early twentieth century, attempting to balance what students need to learn with what students want to learn.

Considering what students might want to learn is a relative novelty in education, secular as well as Jewish. For centuries, Jewish education followed an entirely prescriptive model in which the goals were mastery of halachah—Jewish law—in order to observe it fully, and, for those capable of more advanced learning, study of the Talmud. In other words, the yeshiva curriculum.

Secular education in the nineteenth century was equally prescriptive. While the goal for a child of the aristocracy might have been to become a learned gentleman or a refined lady, the goal for children of the masses was to acquire of useful skills—basic mathematics, grammar, and penmanship—that had immediate commercial utility. Think of Mr. Gradgrind in Dickens’s Hard Times.

With these models, considering what students wanted to learn was an innovation. Actually, recognizing that what students needed to learn and what they wanted to learn might not be identical was the innovation. It embodied the understanding that children are not miniature adults, and that their interests and capacities change as they grow.

About a decade ago, I taught a fifth-grade Hebrew class in which there seemed to be only one topic that students really wanted to study: Pokémon. Pokémon was almost a mania all over the country then, but it is not central to Jewish learning. While a few teachers attempted to use Pokémon to illustrate Jewish values, most felt that it glorified violence and materialism and was, at best, irrelevant to Judaism. (On the other hand, Saudi Arabia banned Pokémon in 2001 because of claims that it had Zionist content.)


Accordingly, students’ interests cannot be the sole criterion. In familiar Jewish terms, students are often like the fourth child in the Passover seder, the child who does not know how to ask. For example, until students have been exposed to Jewish ethics, they are likely to be content with the ethics of secular society. Students who have never attended Shabbat services probably won’t ask to learn the prayers of those services.

Thus, our consideration of students’ interests must be broad, not narrow. For example, we know that young students both need and want to learn how to understand the world around them, and that somewhat older students want to learn how to deal with questions of ethics and morality. By choosing topics that address these concerns, we attempt to draw students into Jewish learning, even if they did not yet know how to ask.