Teaching humanity: Importance of education in Israel's challenging reality - opinion

Educators today must believe that hope is not yet lost – even when it is hidden.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post

Kiryat Shmona Mayor Avichai Stern visits a school in the northern city on the first day back since the beginning of the war, March 9, 2025; illustrative. (photo credit: AYAL MARGOLIN/FLASH90)

In about two weeks, the school year will start again. Girls and boys from all parts of Israeli society will once again make their way to kindergarten and school and begin the year of activities. 

The illusion of a routine continues. What will we tell them? Whose eyes will they encounter? What does life here in Israel teach them? And what can actually be done?

Next week, nearly 500 educators from across the country, from dozens of elementary and high schools, kindergartens, boarding schools, and community activity centers, will convene in Tel Aviv for the Social Pedagogy seminar that the Dror Israel educational network is holding for the fifth year.

In practice, this is the largest, most diverse, and most significant gathering of professionals from all different places, with various identities and roles within the education field, who come together voluntarily during the summer, inspiring hope and the possibility of creating social change through education. 

The seminar is based on the recognition that in the current reality of war, and its impact on the education system, educators urgently need a different kind of encounter, like one needs air to breathe.

Israeli children seen in their classroom on the first day of school since October 7th massacre, in the southern Israeli city of Sderot, March 3, 2024; illustrative. (credit: Liron Moldovan/Flash90)

This encounter allows the suspending of predetermined definitions, positions, and identities and gives space for a deep, creative, and interesting identity to emerge – that of an educator who sees the human urgency in their craft, courageously confronts the injustices of our current reality, and imagines a new one together with their partners, colleagues, and children.

The deep meaning of education becomes clear in the face of forces of systemic oppression, despair, erosion, and heaviness. This is a seminar where one can express pain and helplessness, emerging from it with a new direction and new possibilities. 

It’s an honest, close encounter where the self is shaped through connection rather than alienating or pushing others to the margins – an interaction that exists and moves beyond rigid opinions and positions, opening space for new, untried possibilities to emerge.

It must be an encounter that allows us to move away – even briefly – from the exhausting technical, systemic discourse in favor of a space that feels expansive and renewing. A space where education is experienced as a form of art and as an expression of the beauty and comfort found in our interactions with children. 

Finally, the seminar should be an encounter that inspires real commitment and practical paths toward building a better, more moral, and more humane reality – now more than ever.

So what can the public education system do now, within a reality that has clearly become unbearable?

Choosing education and creating a better society, in an unbearable reality

It must choose to educate – and to fight – for humanity at every opportunity. This means actively seeking ways to strengthen our humanity, deepen responsibility, and cultivate sensitivity within the educational space. 

It means nurturing our connections with children by creating a reality rooted in closeness, trust, and values – that rests on the belief that every person is a human being who was created in the divine image.

At the seminar, educators should embrace the experience, the engagement, and the human reality, starting from within themselves. At each moment, they will experience reconciliation and conflict resolution as an expression of their entire reality. 

They will understand that the classroom, the group, and also the individual child are not only expressions of the existing reality, but also that the possibility to begin anew and better exists within them.

In the social kindergartens of the Dror Israel educational network, the concept of “Peace Ladder” was developed, a framework that, over the years, became the inspiration behind a book that addresses reconciliation and conflict resolution among children and youth. 

In practice, this concept can be applied to four- and five-year-old children in kindergarten to teach them how to solve quarrels, make peace, navigate challenges, and deepen friendships through conflict.

Through this, children experience a reality where repair is possible – one where they are given complete trust but are also given clear guidance. This kind of education is especially important for children living in Israel who are growing up in a complex and difficult reality, children who will one day be required to repair what needs repairing.

Educators today must believe that hope is not yet lost – even when it is hidden – and that something in the struggle for humanity, for what is possible, and for the unknown will bear fruit; otherwise, apparently, there is no point in educating.

The belief in children’s power to change the world cannot be vague and abstract, but must be grounded. This begins with a different kind of encounter between educators and with their willingness to claim their role as active creators of a better society.

The writer is a guidance counselor in the Dror Israel educational network.