Pictures and Models: An Exploration in Jewish Educational Thought.

Abstract

In a now classic article, “Philosophical Models of Teaching,”1 Professor Israel Scheffler distinguishes between activities that may be included in the category of “education” and those, such as indoctrination, or conditioning, that do not qualify. He then notes some questions that characterize the educational venture: “What sort of learning shall I aim to achieve? In what does such learning consist? How shall I strive to achieve it?” He tells us that he will address the questions by way of a consideration of three influential models of teaching which provide, or at any rate suggest, certain relevant answers to the questions above. In this essay, I hope to do the same with regard to three models that seem to be particularly congenial to Jewish education and that, like Scheffler’s models, “do not so much aim to describe teaching as to orient it.”