When the 20th century began, American Jews had created a rich array of schools—ranging from wholly secular to Orthodox, from full-times institutions to afternoon and Sunday schools. A general, across-the-board effort to reform these institutions emerged in the 1910s and 1920s. Jenna Weissman Joselit writes:
A wholesome environment was key to whatever success Jewish educators might enjoy. It didn’t take much to realize that a brightly lit, well-ordered, and colorfully decorated room would attract, where a dark, dank, and dreary one would deter. And yet, for far too long, the Jewish classroom remained an inhospitable space. Improvised rather than intentional, it “chills enthusiasm and is detrimental to the welfare of both teachers and pupils,” observed Alexander Dushkin, a leading proponent of modern Jewish education, in 1918.
His teacher, Samson Benderly, who, arguably, did more than anyone in the United States to elevate the status of Jewish education in the prewar era, put it more starkly: “What can our children think of Judaism if after their stay in the modern public-school buildings, we offer them Jewish classrooms which are badly ventilated and poor lighted and which are very often not kept clean?” His answer: not very much. Jewish children were “bound to interpret the entire heritage of our people in the terms of the physical side of the classroom.”
Negative associations like these were not the exclusive purview of the young. New York City’s Department of Health felt the same way. Acting in 1915 on an anonymous tip about the lamentable physical conditions that obtained in many of the city’s Jewish educational institutions, it investigated the matter and discovered that germs were just about everywhere, especially in what passed for the bathroom. The absence of cleanliness and proper hygiene in these facilities was so striking, the inspectors reported, that they “would not bear very favorable comparison with the Southern school privy, against which sanitarians hold up their hands in horror.”
As Joselit recounts, the modernizing movement that began with cleanliness didn’t stop there, and also included efforts to introduce the latest pedagogic trends—efforts that came under trenchant critique from Midge Decter in 1951.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/evolution-jewish-education-jenna-weissman-joselit