Jews Are SMRT

Sometime during the past two decades, education became very touchy-feely. I’m not sure when or how this happened, but I suspect it has everything to do with the American cult of “self-esteem.” At it’s worst and most insipid, this worship manifests itself in parades and awards and stars for just showing up. You got out of bed this morning – gold star! You are terrific! Everyone’s terrific! You all win!

Way back in the olden days, winning implied a contest or goal – a challenge to be met. True self-worth came from knowing – really, truly, deeply knowing down in your core – that you were the best speller in the school, the top math student in the class, the best tennis player at the championship. How did you know this to be true, all the way down into your kishkes? Because you actually liked something, or thought it was interesting, kept at it, practiced awhile, set your sights on a goal, tried, failed, tried again a few times, failed again, kept trying, and ultimately, mastered it. You were exhausted at the end, and never wanted to see another piano (violin/tap shoes/electron microscope) for twenty years, but you did it.

When Eva was three and a half, I enrolled her in a co-op preschool. The teacher, Ms (pronounced in universal preschool style as “Miss”) Andrea, was the kindest, sweetest, gentlest woman you could meet. She was the perfect first teacher for the fragile, developing young egos in the class. I quibbled, however, with the “never wrong” policy. Being a co-op, parents were assigned work shifts in the classroom a few days each month. We were taught to preserve our delicate little hothouse flowers by gently guiding them toward the correct answer, but never saying, “No” to their ideas. So to the child who claims a puzzle piece is “red” when in fact it is blue, we were to “gently guide them toward discovery” or just agree that red/blue is subject to interpretation. Ditto “two plus two equals five.” Wrong! Some facts are simply facts. No amount of self-esteem workshopping is going to turn poor confused two plus two into five.

I like good old-fashioned old school knowledge, personally. Jews revere knowledge and learning for its own sake. Standing around the Chanukkah candles at synagogue a couple years ago, a young child made one of those disconcertingly brilliant remarks young children sometimes do, and we all just gasped, chuckled to each other about how smart he was, and praised him for about five minutes. It was like the Jewish version of making the big play in a football game.

I bought a CD-ROM called Aleph Bet Adventure so the kids and I can study the Hebrew letters together. There are various games you can play to learn the alphabet (“aleph bet.”) When you give correct answers, one of three voices says, “Way to go!” or something similarly supportive. But accidentally confuse a “bet” and “vet” and you hear a stern, “That is incorrect!” or simply a woman’s voice making a “wrong” buzzer noise. My favorite is an Israeli-accented “Do it again!” (you can almost hear the implied next line, “…and right this time!”)

Yup, Jews take learning seriously (and by all accounts we are getting something right; look at the percentage of Jews in colleges and graduate and professional schools compared to our representation in the overall population. Clearly we rock. Sometimes literally.) There is a tradition that when a Jew begins school for the first time, his parents put a drop of honey the page of a book and he dips his finger in to taste it, showing him that learning will always be sweet.

Pity the poor Jew who just doesn’t have much native intelligence. I imagine this poor person much like my college roommate, who was Asian-American but couldn’t do math or science. We took microbiology together once, and I got a higher grade than she did, if that gives you any idea of how bad at science she was. To make matters worse, we lived in the Co-op, which was where all the poverty-stricken foreign PhD students lived ($585/quarter for room and board in the late 80s.) My friends who were engineering majors were always happy at the convenience of it all, since their TAs always lived right down the hall. These "authentic" Chinese students (she and my other, also Asian-American roommate, called the FOB, or "fresh off the boat") openly mocked the lightweight Asians they encountered in America. Even among non-Asians, people had the audacity to make comments to her like, “Gee, we worried at first that you’d throw off the curve, but boy were we wrong!”

Jews are sometimes similarly blunt. The rabbi just referred to someone today who would ordinarily be considered very smart, but in the high stakes world of Jewish scholarship is no great shakes, as “not by that level brainwise” (“by” in Orthodox Jewish common usage, is an all-purpose preposition that can mean “with,” “at,” or a host of other things.)

I have to admit that as a Jewish mother I was excited when Eva announced that she wanted to be a doctor. Then she wanted to be a specialist: a pediatric kidney surgeon. But after her hospital stay, she was so enamored of the nurses’ station that she wanted to be a nurse (but not in a doctor’s office, where kids have to get shots, but in the hospital, where she can be the one to “run the nurses’ station.” She really liked that nurses’ station.) She’s only four and a half, but I’m steering her toward UCLA, or possibly UCSF. My generation doesn't do the knee jerk libber "Don’t be a nurse, honey! Be a doctor.” We are one step beyond: “Don’t be a peon, dear. Go into management!”