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Conclusion: Learning from What’s Downtown
- Wayne State University Press
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Conclusion learning from what’s downtown Lessons from Sociology for Jewish Education Almost all adults have been to school at some time in their lives. Some, as we have seen, seem to seize the opportunity to go to school again. A review of the popular media and Internet postings suggests that this is a matter of parents no longer trusting teachers, of anxious parents refusing to let go of their children, and of parents taking their rights as consumers to unimagined and invasive extremes. Newspaper and magazines are replete with horror stories of “hovering parents,” “aggressive advocates,” or simply, and most patronizingly, “bad mothers.” These stories all provide ample reason why, as one Time magazine article put it, “teachers hate parents” (Gibbs 2005). Although this book has discussed parents who seize the opportunity to return to school, our study has not been an investigation of parental interference or of “typical, interfering Jewish parents ,” as one principal crudely put it to us. Doubtless, interfering parents do exist at DJDS, and their interference is probably part of the reason for the high turnover of senior professionals in the school. But early on in the research process at DJDS we decided not to conduct a study of the conflicts we observed between parents and teachers, or between school committees and the principal . Those conflicts are familiar phenomena in almost every school, and not just in private Jewish institutions, something depressingly suggested by the fact that a Google search of “parent + conflict + school” produces a yield of 11,800,000 items. 151 With this study we chose instead to pay attention to something we found more interesting, partly because we share a concern for the study and development of Jewish identity but also because we identified a phenomenon that surprised us and that seemed to surprise many parents and professionals with whom we spoke. Put simply, we found that children’s schools—children ’s Jewish elementary schools, to be precise—play an important role in the lives of many Jewish adults. A previously quoted comment from Ian Seigal, a DJDS parent, nicely communicates the unexpectedness of this phenomenon: “I’m pleasantly surprised by how much I like to talk about [my child’s school]. I never thought it would be something like that. . . . You know, you send your child to school, that’s what you do. It’s part of being a parent. But it’s more than that, and I realize that [now], and I definitely did not realize that before. . . . I didn’t think as a parent it would be any different [from when I was student], but it does feel different. It’s more important.” In this conclusion we argue that the unexpected relationships that parents develop with their children’s Jewish day schools are best understood against the backdrop of changing patterns of Jewish identification over the last century, with adult Jews finding personal and religious meaning in a diversifying range of settings. In the final sections of this chapter we explore the implications of these changing patterns for teachers, principals, and community planners—Jewish professionals whose current responsibilities do not call for thinking of Jewish elementary schools as environments well suited to the nurture of adult Jewish engagement. Changing Patterns of Jewish Identification It is helpful to situate our work, as a study in the sociology of Jewish identity, within broader theoretical themes in the study of ethno-religious identity. As we have written elsewhere, recent reflections in this field point to an important shift in our understanding of how individuals construct their sense of ethnic or religious identity (Schnoor 2006). Scholars of ethnic studies, for example, argue that ethnic identity is no longer a fixed, essentialist status but rather a social con152 Conclusion [34.229.110.49] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:16 GMT) struction that is continually negotiated and renegotiated by the individual (Nagel 1994; Spector and Kitsuse 1987). Ethnic identi- fiers can now slip in and out of ethnic roles depending on the social context (Waters 1990). Scholars of the sociology of religion have described a similar societal shift in religious identity construction. Robert Wuthnow (1998, 9–10) described religious identity as shifting from a “spirituality of dwelling” to a “spirituality of seeking.” He argues that an individual is no longer constrained by ascribed characteristics but rather, as “Sovereign Self,” constructs his or her own personal religious identity by pulling together elements from various repertoires. Wade Clark...