Curriculum Overview
Hebrew School is typically taught on Sunday and on one day of the week either Tuesday or Wednesday in the evening following secular education in private or public schools. Hebrew School Education developed in the 1800s and is largely credited to Rebecca Gratz.
Today, typical Hebrew School education starts in kindergarten and culminates in the tenth grade with confirmation. While the idea of confirmation largely grew out of Reform Judaism, it is largely practiced by both the Reform and Jewish Conservative Movements today. However, Hebrew School Education is based in the Reform and Conservative Movements and therefore, not practiced in the Jewish Orthodox Movement. Instead Orthodox students attend religious schools on a daily basis such as Yeshivas where they study Jewish texts like Torah and the Talmud in greater depth. Orthodox schooling often prepares young boys to become rabbis and involves a deeper level of study than Hebrew School Education provides. Whereas, both boys and girls study in Hebrew Schools in a co-educational environment, education in the Orthodox community is based on single-sex education with greater emphasis placed on traditional roles for men and women.
However, some Orthodox congregations do offer Hebrew School for non-Orthodox students, such as the TAG Hebrew schools common in Chabad houses.
Read more about this topic: Hebrew School
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“If we focus exclusively on teaching our children to read, write, spell, and count in their first years of life, we turn our homes into extensions of school and turn bringing up a child into an exercise in curriculum development. We should be parents first and teachers of academic skills second.”
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