Two new studies provide interesting insights about the lives of today’s Jewish teens. The new American Religious Identification Survey found that the number of Jews who define themselves as Jews by religion is going down, while the number who identify as Jews by ethnicity is staying the same.  Meanwhile, a BBYO study of Jewish teens found that 67 percent would like to better connect with their religion but 48 percent of those claimed they did not know how, and 55 percent said they wanted a less conventional way to connect. These trends suggest that new modes of Jewish life are being developed – and we are proud to say that we are part of leading this project as we help Jewish college students imagine how they want to be Jewish, combining Jewish tradition with their values and ideas.

Q: How do you see your work in the context of the school-reform movement?

The message of my work is that schools need to give students a better understanding of why they are in school in the first place — that is, how the skills students are learning can help them accomplish their life goals. That is the only way to really motivate students in a lasting way. And if you ask any teacher what the major problems in schooling these days are, I’m sure that student motivation will be at the top of the list.

Now in order to help students understand what schooling can help them accomplish, they must be given opportunities to reflect on what they want to do with their lives. What are their ultimate concerns, their highest purposes? What kinds of people do they want to be? Those questions should not be asked or answered in a vacuum. Good schools can provide students with rich historical and literary knowledge about how such questions have been addressed by thoughtful people throughout the ages.

Present-day school-reform movements tend to focus on basic skills, especially ones that can be measured by standardized tests. The skills are important, and the test scores can be useful as indicators of learning. But the skills and the scores are means to an end and not ends in themselves, and they should be presented to students in that way.

Students learn bits of knowledge that they may see little use for; and from time to time someone at a school assembly urges them to go and do great things in the world. When it comes to drawing connections between the two — that is, showing students how a math formula or a history lesson could be important for some purpose that a student may wish to pursue — schools too often leave their students flat.

If you visit a typical classroom and listen for the teacher’s reasons for why the students should do their schoolwork, you will hear a host of narrow, instrumental goals, such as doing well in the course, getting good grades, and avoiding failure, or perhaps — if the students are lucky — the value of learning a specific skill for its own sake. But rarely (if ever) will you hear the teacher discuss with students broader purposes that any of these goals might lead to. Why do people read or write poetry? Why do scientists split genes? Why did I work hard to become a teacher? How can schools expect that young people will find meaning in what they are doing if they so rarely draw their attention to considerations of the personal meaning and purpose of the work others do?

© Copyright 2008 Inside Higher Ed

This morning’s Daily Northwestern writes about the development of an initiative I founded last year called AskBigQuestions. The article focuses in particular on ABQ’s growth from being exclusively sponsored by Hillel to becoming an independent entity with sponsoring organizations from a variety of religious and scholarly communities.

This piece (see page 67), which I wrote last spring, tells a bit of the history of AskBigQuestions. What has changed since that time is that we have figured out one of the central conundrums of the initiative, namely: How does it relate to Hillel’s mission of inspiring students to make an enduring commitment to Jewish life? The Big Questions of ABQ are questions common to all human beings, regardless of one’s background. That’s precisely what makes it attractive to so many students. Yet it’s also what makes it difficult to explain to Jewish organizations and funders, who have often asked: “Why should we support something that brings together Jewish and non-Jewish students for discussions about topics that aren’t necessarily Jewish?” In other words, ABQ doesn’t promote Jewish particularism, it promotes humanism, and that’s not  necessarily part of Hillel’s agenda.

In moving ABQ outside of Hillel, while retaining a key sponsoring role for Hillel within a larger multivocal conversation, we’ve solved a key piece of this problem. The critics are right on this score: getting students in touch with life’s Big Questions is not solely Hillel’s challenge; rather, it is a challenge for the entire university community, of which Hillel is but one member.

Yet the key point remains: Hillel needs to be a leader in this effort, because we still believe in the fundamental value proposition that it is good for all students to ask these questions–including Jewish students. Our hope is that as all students engage the Big Questions of life, they will engage in the journey of self-discovery and engagement that leads to exploration of where they come from and development of their identity. My hope would be that through AskBigQuestions, Catholic students will explore their Catholic roots; Muslim students will explore their own beliefs and traditions; secular humanist students will look to the great philosophers; Jews will uncover Jewish ideas and texts; and all of these students will encounter one another. An image to represent this might be something like this:

This diagram represents what I think is the greatest aspect of AskBigQuestions:These questions are the common animating questions of the world’s great religious and scholarly traditions, and therefore they provide a common meeting point of conversation–or, what some of us would call the commons. By creating an environment in which we can explore, and not argue about, our multiple identities–secular, religious, ethnic, cultural–ABQ at once creates a universal humanistic common ground, and encourages particularistic expression. What we do with ABQ is redraw the line of religious and secular in a way that rejects the binary posited by so many in both religious and secular spheres, and instead includes them both in a common conversation about the meaning of human experience.

We don’t have to choose between being religious or secular, particularist or universalist. In today’s world, we have to be both: we have to go deeper in discovering our own identities at the same time as we go deeper in discovering what links us with one another.

Questions for us: What can we, as a co-curricular organization, learn 
from curricular entities? What are we uniquely positioned to 
contribute? What if more institutions of higher education adopted 
approaches like the one advocated in this book–what would that mean 
for Hillel?

The key graf to me is this one: 

“The biggest behavior changes come with getting married, not with 
having children,” Kelman said. “Neither of us expected that.” 

Why would this be the case? One hypothesis is that the move of 
marriage is a bolder one that it once was. Another is that in our 
cultural imagination, marriage is often the end of the storyline– 
think how many movies and TV shows end with a wedding; they don’t end 
with the birth of a child. That may be implied, or it might not be. 
But marriage has become a giant differentiator in our culture. Thus 
when people get married, they ‘stop doing the stuff they did when they 
were younger;’ they start living the script of ‘grown-ups.’ (They may 
well start living that script before they get married, too, and they 
may also fail to make the jump once they do get married. But in 
general I’d say there’s a strong correlation.) 

I have been struck since the Consultation by the notion of personal 
narrative, and how the congruence or incongruence between one’s life 
and the ‘script’ of one’s life is at the core of authenticity, 
identity, and integrity. During the Consultation, I realized and point 
out that there is no real script for emerging adulthood, save some TV 
series like Friends or How I Met Your Mother. And even in those shows, 
there is a definite valence towards getting married. So it may be what 
we’re seeing here is that, as people get married, they start living a 
new narrative, one which for them includes commitment to Jewish life. 

What might this imply for Hillel?

I am not the first to notice that, in general, a major shift tends to occur around the beginning or middle of a student’s junior year. Their maturity level increases. They seem to grasp that their academic work isn’t simply about getting good grades or writing the paper they think their professor expects, but that intellectual life can have its own intrinsic rewards. Often times this correlates with a study abroad experience or moving into their first apartment. 

In Jewish terms, what strikes me the most is that students at this stage often move from a discomfort or resistance towards traditional modes of Jewish expression–text, ritual–to a greater curiosity or embrace of it. I tend to get many more juniors and seniors interested in study and conversations of meaning than I do freshmen and sophomores.

There’s nothing new here: I like to say that I didn’t really figure out how to go to college until the middle of my junior year (it’s a shame the first two years cost as much as they did). But do we take these developmental realities into account in our assessment of success, or in designing meaningful Jewish experiences? What does it mean to educate a Jewish student at each of these stages within emerging adulthood? What risks can and should we take, and what are the costs associated with them? We have only begun to do this at Northwestern. I’m curious to hear others’ thoughts.