What Christians Can Learn from the Jewish Schools of the Future

The COVID pandemic, the economic travails it has caused, and the social unrest that followed in its wake have all set American society on a new footing. Parents with school-age children are figuring out what the fall will hold for their students, with some school districts going fully online, others delaying start dates, and many figuring out how to implement a raft of health protocols to facilitate in-person instruction. But the Great Disruption that Eric Cohen describes in “The Jewish Schools of the Future” contains more than the pandemic and the human response to it. The economy has taken a plunge and the so-called “great awokening” has stirred riots and the tearing down of statues of figures from American history. Both economic downturn and social unrest have put more pressure on schools, especially those that work to pass along a tradition of biblical faith or American citizenship.

Yet this moment also contains opportunities for parents and communities who wish to pass those great goods on to their children. I’m grateful to Eric Cohen for his extraordinary “imaginative effort” to rethink Jewish education. The moment is ripe to undertake such a reconsideration, and, for a Christian like me, who sees in Cohen’s analysis a shared set of challenges, and in his provocations, inspiration for rearing the young in my own faith, this is a most welcome conversation.

In what follows, I’d like to add to his proposals by considering how his analysis of Jewish education might be extended to the world of Catholic classical education, and then consider how Jews and Christians might work together to form and protect American civic education, such that we might pursue the common civic good while also protecting and bolstering the particular formation of our respective traditions.