An Application of Schwab's Educational Commonplaces: Examining One Aspect of the Milieu Commonplace as Reflected in a Synagogue in a Florida Retirement Community

70 SHOFAR Spring 1993 Vol. 11, No.3 AN APPLICATION OF SCHWAB'S EDUCATIONAL COMMONPlACES: EXAMINING ONE ASPECT OF THE MILIEU COMMONPlACE AS REFLECTED IN A SYNAGOGUE IN A FLORIDA RETIREMENT COMMUNIlY by Burton I. Cohen Burton I. Cohen serves as Associate Professor of Jewish Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. His articles have appeared in the NSSE Yearbook, jewish Education, and the Meltonjournal. Co-editor ofStudies in jewish Education andjudaica in Honor ofLouis Newman (KTAV, 1984), he has recently completed a volume of studies ofJewish schools. He specializes in the pre-service preparation of teachers for non-Orthodox day schools and in informal Jewish education. One of the recurring ideas in the writings of the noted educational scholar, Joseph Schwab, is the usefulness of employing four coordinate commonplaces, (1) student, (2) teacher, (3) subject matter, and (4) milieu, in analyzing an educational setting. It was to this aspect of his educational approach that he was referring in one of his later articles when he said, ... no one contributor to curriculum decision is by nature the fountainhead of decision.... I have put such emphasis on this matter because curriculum decision has been so commonly based on subject-matter considerations alone, or political-communal considerations alone, or the individual child's want or need alone, and so on.... Without such consideration [of all four commonplaces], curricular planning results in errors which later require corrections which tum out to be another misemphasis requiring another An Application of Schwab's Educational Commonplaces correction, and so on indefinitely.' 71 It was Schwab's contention that only by examining these commonplaces, in themselves and in relationship to one another as they appear within a specific educational setting, could one extract all that there was to know about the setting, and gain the fullest understanding of the dynamics of that setting, so as to make curricular decisions in the most informed fashion. It is this researcher's impression that research in Jewish education in recent decades has tended to focus upon the subject matter, the teacher, and the student commonplaces. Other than to assign the reasons for many of the failings of the Jewish educational enterprise to the parents of students and their Jewishly impoverished homes, little has been done to study and analyze the effects and potential impact of milieu factors upon the educational experience of the child in the Jewish school. Observations made by this researcher in the course of an evaluation of the educational program of Congregation Israel, a Conservative synagogue in Sun City, a south Florida retirement community, drew his attention to the strong and complex effects of milieu factors and the extent to which they tend to be neglected by Jewish educators. The Congregation Israel board had decided to commission an evaluation in hopes of resolving a conflict which had arisen relating to the synagogue educational program. As will be explained, this conflict was rooted in the demographic makeup of the synagogue: in an 800-member congregation, over two-thirds of the member-families (or individual members) were well above child-bearing age, senior citizens in fact. Even so the congregation had persisted in maintaining full-scale formal and informal educational programs for the children of members. Here then was the anomaly of a synagogue program which conformed to the established model of a "full-service" synagogue despite its irrelevance to the needs of the large majority of the membership. The circumstance seemed to offer the evaluator a good opportunity to observe and reflect upon how the educational program of the synagogue does function and might function when the majority of families are of retirement age rather than childbearing age. These circumstances are becoming increasingly common as the constituencies of the many North American synagogues founded in the post-war period mature. 'Joseph J. Schwab, "The Practical 4: Something for Curriculum Professors to Do," Curriculum Inquiry 13 (1980), p. 241. 72 SHOFAR Spring 1993 Vol. 11, No.3 A Description of the Congregation Israel Educational Program The educational program of Congregation Israel, like those of many synagogues, is broken down into four parts: a. the Nursery School; b. the Sunday School for those children of elementary school age who...