What if the research is right? What if all our efforts to provide our children with a rich Jewish education during their elementary years are simply sowing the seeds for an adolescent rejection of their tradition?

This, it appears, is precisely what is happening. Kathryn Owens, a clinical supervisor at Jewish Family Services in Ottawa, spoke recently of rather disturbing research findings: faith-based education that ends when adolescence begins is profoundly ineffective in inculcating a commitment to one’s tradition. Worse, it may ensure its rejection. In the subconscious mind of late adolescence, early faith-based education comes to be associated with SpongeBob and games of hide-and-seek   – in other words, with all that one has out-grown.

I have taught world religion courses to thousands of university students over the past 11 years. In that time, I have encountered the paradox of which Owens spoke. Students who had early but unsustained exposure to their faith traditions (Jewish, Catholic, Hindu, etc.) were typically the weakest students, often cynical, disinterested, and usually profoundly ignorant not only of other traditions, but of their own as well. I often get to know these students more than their peers, since, near the end of term, they’re the ones who come in to my office in droves to try to salvage failing grades.

By contrast, students who have had absolutely no prior religious education are often among those who do the best. Their interest in their own tradition emerges in the context of maturity,  and is an expression of their own self-directed growth. They are eager to know more.

Related Story: Ottawa's main Jewish high school to close
 

Owens explained that the adolescent mind should be thought of as  “under construction.” Adolescence is a time of tremendous growth in cognitive capacities, most pointedly in the areas of self-reflection and critical thinking. During this tumultuous and creative process, the stuff of childhood is up for grabs, to be retained or set aside. For whatever reason (and there are a great many intervening societal factors), the commitment to a faith-based tradition is commonly set aside – often forcefully. 

Every culture institutes rites of passage at precisely this juncture because we know intuitively what modern psychology now confirms: adolescence represents a kind of “birth,” a profound rupture with early life that needs to be honoured and handled with care.

Students who continue in faith-based education through their adolescent years go through the same process of transition as every other adolescent. But now they confront a tradition that bears little resemblance to the spinning of dreidels and performance of Purim theatrics for the delight of bubbies and zaides (all of which are precious and wonderful engagements for the young child).

Now they confront the full force of a grand, imposing and intellectually demanding tradition that has nourished among the most fertile minds known to humanity. And here, most crucially, they find their own intellectual queries and existential yearnings being asked and debated within their tradition. This is true every bit as much for the secular Jew as for the Orthodox. Jewish tradition’s deep philosophical roots transcend sectarianism. Indeed, they speak directly to the human condition.

And that is why I believe the recent decision to close Ottawa’s main Jewish high school after this academic year is a profound mistake. The school provides an outstanding intellectual learning environment, one that’s welcoming to the entire Jewish community. It is a place where students apply the same skills of critical thinking to every subject and where they excel academically (as evidenced by a surfeit of university scholarships). 

To be sure, the high school is in a very precarious place, but as a vital limb of the Ottawa Jewish communal body, it is in need of healing, not amputation. Unfortunately, it has not yet received any. Instead, the high school has suffered neglect, treated as the orphan child.

The school’s board has felt compelled to see the school close because it is not financially viable at current enrolment levels. But this is like a physician who, after reading the declining vital signs of a patient without ever administering oxygen, pronounces the patient’s doom. The board’s job is bigger than that of financial responsibility and requires a vision more expansive than that of an accountant.

Ottawa’s Jewish high school needs healing. Let us try as a community to provide it with that. 

Anne Vallely is an associate professor in the department of classics and religious studies at the University of Ottawa. The Facebook page dedicated to saving the school can be found here.