35
cedures which cancel out the differences
between boarding schools and regular
schools." He also accused the youth village
of "voluntarily surrendering [its] potential
influence over the youngsters" by allowing
them too much contact with the outside
world and by taking in too many non-
residential pupils from the surrounding
area, largely out of economic necessity.
Gottesman understandably comes out
strongly for a "return to the faith" of
Zionist idealism and for restoring the
unique role of the youth village in in-
culcating these values. He articulates the
choices facing these schools quite clearly:
either they return to their original sense
of mission, or they will lose the justifica-
tion for their separate — and costly — ex-
istence. He argues that if the schools limit
their goals simply to improving educa-
tional achievements, as they have tended
to do in recent years, then the expense en-
tailed in maintaining them would not be
justified for the vast majority of pupils
now there. This group includes youngsters
"from secure homes, those whose [educa-
tional achievements are average or above],
most pupils in the Association for Educa-
tional Advancement schools [run by the
Education Ministry], the majority of
yeshiva high school students, and perhaps
many of those studying at ultra-Orthodox
yeshivas too."
Many of the advocates of a significant
role for Youth Aliya in the education of
disadvantaged youth have tended to point
to the lack of viable alternatives for keep-
ing them in their local schools and improv-
ing their achievements, or of ways to in-
troduce more positive influences in general
to their home and neighborhood life. This
may have been an accurate reading of
Israel's education and welfare situation in
the early 1970s when Youth Aliya received
its mandate to expand its services for
Israeli-born youth, but it is now out of
date.
The government's senior social welfare
expert, Dr. Yitzhak Brick of the Ministry
of Labor and Social Affairs, explained that
in the last five years his ministry has
begun to develop a wide range of services
within the community for children of prob-
lem families, with the aim of cutting back
on the number of children sent to institu-
tions. Effective community-based solu-
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tions are now available, he said, which are
better for the children and much cheaper
than boarding schools. This is a trend, he
noted, that has marked welfare services
throughout the western world in the last
decade or so. Brick, the director of personal
and family services in the ministry, re-
ceived his PhD. at the Heller School of
Social Welfare at Brandeis University.
Brick was one of the officials cited above
who had no idea how Youth Aliya deter-
mines the number of places needed in
boarding schools for disadvantaged youth.
He recalled that attempts in recent years
to coordinate policies on residential educa-
tion with Youth Aliya and the Education
Ministry had failed, and hoped that this
could be achieved in the future.
The ministry's policies and procedures
for dealing with "children at risk" from
problem families were explained by
Elisheva Shalev, a senior official in Brick's
division. She said that in the past, social
workers or distraught parents tended to
favor the easy solution of sending children
to boarding schools. Now, she said, the
ministry and the municipal welfare depart-
ments try more to work with problem fam-
ilies to improve their situation and keep
the children at home.
Since social work techniques for helping
problem families have improved in recent
years, along with the know-how required to
run effective facilities in the community for
children at risk, the ministry favors board-
ing school solutions only as a last resort.
Shalev cited this as a major difference in
approaches between the ministry and
Youth Aliya, which is ideologically commit-
ted to residential education as the best
solution in most circumstances.
She added that some parents who are
looking for short-cut solutions to their
problems by sending a child away also try
to avoid the difficult and. often painful pro-
cess of self-rehabilitation favored today by
social workers. Families do this by apply-
ing directly to Youth Aliya, which under
present arrangements is not required to
coordinate its placeinent work with local
welfare offices. Shalev stressed that Youth
Aliya is not equipped to rehabilitate prob-
lem families, either as an alternative to sen-
ding a child to a boarding school or as a
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Education
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Devel. and
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Dept.
Part One