Middle Israel: Ignorance is approaching the Jewish state

Stealthy, conniving and seductive, ignorance is approaching the Jewish state.

Yes, formally more Israelis have been getting more education. Nearly 80,000 obtained academic degrees last year, half from Israel’s nine universities, while teachers’ seminaries graduated nearly 11,000 and the rest of the colleges 28,000, an overall annual increase of 2.8%, according to data released this week by the Central Bureau of Statistics as the academic year began.

These figures are part of a dramatic transition whereby almost every second Israeli younger than 40 has attended at some stage an academic institution, more than double the equivalent share in 1990. Better yet, the overall number of higher-education students more than trebled over this period, having swelled more than twice as fast as the population’s demographic growth.

This scholastic revolution is obviously a blessing, the happy result of higher education’s exposure to competition, and its consequent access to broader populations, following the licensing of new colleges’ establishment since 1993.

How, then, can this intensified spread of knowledge happen in tandem with the spread of ignorance? Well, it can, and it does,
because the education that is proliferating is not intellectual education. Instead, thousands are flocking to what is effectively vocational education.

THE CRISIS of intellectual education is reflected in the gathering erosion of liberal arts throughout Israel’s veteran universities. The numbers released recently by the Council for Higher Education are as simple as they are alarming.

BA students’ enrollment in humanities departments such as history, philosophy, literature, or linguistics stood last year at 10,698. In 2010 that figure stood at 13,849, meaning a drop of more than 22%, while the population grew by more than 15%. Enrollment in social sciences, including, for instance, economics, sociology and anthropology, has plunged since 2010 by 16%, from 41,171 to 34,324.

At the same time, enrollment in computer science and related fields soared, from 9,122 to 16,780. The number of students who chose the biomedical fields climbed from 4,675 to 4,831; physics and its related fields drew 2,644 students, up from 2,484 at the decade’s outset, and the number of medical students rose from 1,457 to 2,047.

True, the humanities – which as recently as 1996 attracted 37% of BA students, as opposed to 25% today – are not alone in their popularity’s decline. Enrollments in Israel’s law schools – once a fiercely contested destination among new university applicants – has plunged by more than 22% since 2010, from 15,790 to 12,223.

However, while that decline reflects the same market forces that are hurting the humanities – the new law colleges have swamped the legal industry with new lawyers – it does not threaten the future of the law school itself. The liberal-arts departments, by contrast, are becoming endangered species.

The National Academy of Sciences’ last Report on the State of Science in Israel (2016) warns of “an intensifying crisis” in the humanities reflected by their departments’ “steadily declining number of students, so much so that it is approaching a single-digit share of the overall number of students in Israel.”

The humanities’ share of the universities’ resources has been steadily shrinking, meaning recurring budget cuts, departmental mergers and program cancellations.

“It is a vicious cycle,” said the report. “The more departments and programs are devalued, the more their attractiveness declines” in the eyes of potential students and researchers.

The dangers of this trend are clear: In an era governed by technology and mammon, the young are encouraged to invent gadgets, develop applications, engineer financial instruments, issue shares in the stock market and make a quick exit after enlisting a venture capital fund’s hot money, while neglecting intellectual knowledge, creation and thought.

In such a Zeitgeist, there is little room left for Moses, Isaiah, Homer, Plato, Kant, Russo, Agnon or Oz. “Philosophy is dead,” announced last winter billboard ads in Tel Aviv, part of a local engineering school’s effort to dissuade prospective applicants from choosing humanities.

It read like a biblical writing on a straying society’s wall.

THE PROBLEM, to be sure, is not unique to Israel. In the US, English majors have fallen some 50% since 1990, and history majors have fallen by a similar proportion over the last dozen years alone, according to an article last year in The Atlantic.

Even so, Israel’s problem is even worse because we don’t have American colleges’ system, whereby undergraduates study many subjects, including multiple majors and minors. Instead, Israeli higher education expects an undergraduate student to specialize from day one in one or two fields. Israeli universities have consequently been producing narrowly focused graduates for generations.
The ostensibly golden era in which thousands flocked to the history, philosophy and literature departments was not the age of enlightenment that its eulogizers now portray. Instead, it produced graduates who knew more and more about less and less, until they knew everything about nothing, as former Columbia University president Nicholas Butler defined modern experts.

Paradoxically, Israeli academia’s problem is a secular version of ultra-Orthodox education’s problem – namely, the lack of a governmentally imposed core curriculum.

Thirty-four years since the 1985 hyperinflation crisis, Israel is so economically mature and financially vibrant that it now has 131,000 millionaires, according to Credit Suisse’s global wealth report. As heirs to the civilization that invented compulsory education already in antiquity, we now must launch a revolution that will match our new material prosperity with a new intellectual wealth.

This can be accomplished by declaring the crisis of humanities as a national crisis, and shifting to the American college system, whereby any undergraduate education will include a cluster of courses in history, thought and literature.

This way, every college student will read and ponder some of humanity’s monumental texts, and while at it also learn to think, debate, doubt and explore in ways that a narrow professional education will never inspire.

www.MiddleIsrael.net

The writer’s best-selling Mitz’ad Ha’ivelet Hayehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sfarim, 2019), is an interpretation of the Jewish people’s political history.