Deborah Kallen and the Palestinian Yishuv: The Personal Tragedy of an Educational Pioneer

DEBORAH KALLEN AND THE PALESTINIAN YISHUV: THE PERSONAL TRAGEDY OF AN EDUCATIONAL PIONEER Sarah Schmidt A Personal Note The first time I heard the name Deborah Kallen was in 1972, while interviewing her brother, the social philosopher Horace M. Kallen. Our subject was his contribution to the formulation of a specifically American concept of Zionism, and he began by telling me, with evident pride, of his most meaningful Zionist connection , his sister Deborah, who had moved to Palestine in 1920 and had contributed her American perspective to building the system of education there. A quarter of a century later I was teaching a course on "The Israeli Woman: From Myth to Reality" to North American students at Tel Aviv University and looking for material on American women who had contributed to building the yishuv, especially those American women who had tried to extend the American value system to the model society they assumed was then in the process of formation. Aside from works by and about Golda Meir and Henrietta Szold there was little to be found. And so I decided to look for Deborah Kallen.1 Nashim:A Journal ofJewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues, no. 4. © 2001197 Sarah Schmidt The Beginnings Deborah Kallen, born in Boston in 1888, was one of eight children in a large Orthodox Jewish family that had recently emigrated from Germany to the United States. She was educated in the public schools of Boston and, hoping to develop a career as a painter, as a young adult attended classes in drawing and painting at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. As a way of rounding out her education she also audited courses on art and design at Harvard College and on education at its then sister school, Radcliffe. Her studies there proved to be the decisive influence on her life, for early on she became an exponent of a new system of art education for children, one that emphasized her conception that the key to character building lay in teaching young children the principles ofgood design.2 As a result, she was appointed to the staff of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, responsible both for classes for children and for instructing other teachers in her methods of teaching design. In 1920 Deborah took a two-year leave of absence from the museum and accepted an invitation from the Va'ad hahinukh, the official supervisory body for education in Palestine, to help train students at the Zionist teachers' seminary in Jaffa and at the British government seminary for Arab teachers in Jerusalem. Since she had previously shown no particular interest in Zionism, what impelled her to take this step is not entirely clear.3 A contributory factor was surely the struggle she had waged in the United States to have art accepted as part of the elementary school curriculum. In order to prove the worth of art in the school curriculum as quickly as possible, many art teachers began by having their pupils copy pictures from textbooks, often without any consideration of the picture's intrinsic artistic value. Art instruction focused not on what the children saw but on what they saw in picture books, on exercises in copying without any aesthetic or creative contribution on the part of the student. Deborah Kallen developed her own system in direct opposition to this, stressing that children, rather than being required to copy, must be helped to develop their powers of observation. She considered this the most appropriate means to guide them in learning how to think critically and express an independent point of view. But she found herself waging a lonely fight, isolated in her perspective regarding what art education was about.4 198 Deborah Kallen and the Palestinian Yishuv Deborah had also come to realize that her goal of becoming an artist in her own right was unlikely to be realized. Her talent was not distinct enough, and she lacked the requisite forcefulness to bring her work to the attention of the public. Possibly most discouraging was the evaluation of her art teacher and mentor at Harvard, Professor Denim Ross, who (as she recalled almost a half century later) told her that he...