In Israeli public schools, the debate on pluralism comes down to a simple case of arithmetic: For the past 18 months, the government has been subtracting money from science and technology programs and adding to religious education.
For a country that has staked its economy on science and technology, warned Haim Harari, president of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, to nip science education in budding students could provoke a real crisis.
He was in San Francisco this week to meet with donors and science researchers.
Harari, whose assessments of science education are considered by many Israelis as a barometer of how their tech students are faring, recently put himself on the line.
He resigned in January from two key appointed positions in the Ministry of Education, including the chairmanship of the Commission for the Advancement of Science and Technology Education.
Describing his last stand, Harari said, “You fight within the system as long as you can. So I resigned in protest.” Harari hopes his departure from public positions, and a change in government in the May elections, will herald a renewed push for sciences as a staple of the school budget.
Simply put, he wants a return to the glory days of science and technology in Israel’s schools — a time when the government unanimously agreed with Harari that hard sciences were the bread and butter of Israeli education.
“We lived in this happy bubble until 1998,” Harari said, when the fervently religious Yitzhak Levy became minister of education, supplanting a previous minister who was also fervently religious. “Last year’s fairly dramatic change to the negative in developing science education came as a surprise.”
Why the cuts? Harari alleged that politicians, trying to justify their jobs, started meddling in school budgets.
That left room for religious political parties to up their ante in the fray over the government’s education budget. According to Harari, “the ultra-Orthodox are not against science, they just don’t give a damn about it. They have other priorities.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the only person who could have stepped in to stem the decline in science and technology funding. He made no such moves.
Harari thinks Israel is making a major mistake, especially at a time when the country needs a technology-literate populace more than ever.
“Science and technology enter into every corner of our life, no matter how high or low one’s job position is,” Harari said. “The main point is that science and technology should be for all, not for kids specializing in science.”
To remedy the problem, Harari advocates a set of proposals on science education that he formulated with school teachers in 1992. The recommendations include computers in every school, special math teachers from third grade on, new teachers and revised curricula for new technologies.
Harari said women in particular should receive added encouragement to study hard sciences. Too often, they are intimidated by the field early in their schooling.
Excessive exuberance over Israel’s successes in science — especially its booming high-tech industries — is also a potential trap, Harari warned. A false sense of science security could lull the country into sticking with the status quo. But, he said, “In science education, you have to run pretty fast just to stay in the same place.”
So far, it’s mostly the elite who have cashed in on Israel’s technology-heavy economy, Harari said.
“If we are talking about a real healthy futuristic economy, some scientific literacy has to propagate into the masses. Otherwise we have rich technocrats and that creates huge social gaps.”