Her Lesson Plan Was Junk
About the author: Matti Friedman is an Israeli journalist and the author, most recently, of Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel.
When you pass the kindergarten at Sde Eliyahu, a kibbutz near the Jordan River in northern Israel, you might not recognize it. Instead, you’ll see a yard for castaway objects: rusty tractor parts, old computers, and orphaned bike wheels. It takes a few moments to realize that some person, or many people, has devoted thought to arranging the parts into strange structures and machines.
What seems at first like a haphazard jumble in the yard at this kibbutz, and in hundreds of similar yards across Israel, is in fact the expression of a theory about how children should learn and a sharp critique of the way they’re usually taught. The kindergarten junkyard is countercultural at a moment preoccupied with safety and litigation—but may have something to teach parents who’ve just been through a yearlong education on the limits of education itself. The junkyard is one answer to a pressing question: When we teach kids, should we prepare them to climb an orderly ladder of tests that lead to other tests, grades, and degrees—or should we prepare them for chaos?
I found Malka Haas at Sde Eliyahu in the spring, in a knitted winter hat and sweater, sitting in a wheelchair pushed by her son, Elisha. She recently turned 100, has been blind for several years, and is now too frail to walk or be interviewed. But she was a dominant figure in the Israeli world of early-childhood education well into her 90s. My wife is from this kibbutz, a product of the kindergarten junkyard, and she—like everyone else who grew up here—speaks of Haas with great reverence and a little fear. Haas was never a teacher of the bubbly variety. She’s a tough woman who learned some tough lessons, and came up with tough ideas.
.png)