Yitzhak Laor: Welcome, kids, to the first day of becoming Israel-loving dolts
Our state does not need teachers. It needs agents, and on the cheap. You too, children, will become agents.
haaretz.com
On Thursday, for the
first time in your life, your mother, father or both will take you to
school. That day is unforgettable. I for instance remember the teacher
Yehudit who greeted us 62 years ago. I even remember her dress, striped
in pink and white. My son, I discovered, hasn’t forgotten his first
teacher, Atara. They taught us, each in his generation, the most
important thing one learns at school: to read and write. We arrive
illiterate and after a semester or two, thanks to the teacher, we can
read and write. Even though reading and writing have become part of an
industry in which it isn’t clear whether today’s children texting with
both thumbs on their smartphones in broken language are slaves or just
prisoners, this moment is a precious one. What comes afterwards doesn’t
matter. What does really matter won’t be there.
Did
you like to draw in preschool? The state doesn’t need your imagination.
It will therefore crush it through decoration: lulavs (palm fronds),
the Patriarch Moses, tanks, Hanukkah menorahs, the seven species of
Sukkot and, of course, the Israeli flag. Red skies, yellow sea,
blue-eyed dogs, cats with serpentine tails – that, no. And you don’t get
to see Degas, or Soutine, or Moshe Gershuni or Tamar Getter. It isn’t
that there aren’t any art teachers. There are tons of art teachers. It’s
that the state simply doesn’t want them.
If
your family hoped that school would teach you to play music, they were
mistaken, naive. Music is only for children whose parents can pay. And
you won’t ever just listen quietly to music, and won’t sing in three
voices or even two. There are music teachers. Lots of them. But who
needs them? Learn the holiday songs – that, yes. On Rosh Hashanah sing
some stupid song for Rosh Hashanah, during Sukkot sing Sukkot songs,
during Hanukkah sing Hanukkah songs, the teacher singing loudly and you
quietly, until you learn to yell. And “Hatikva,” of course (the Jewish
anthem, once sung with a lot of hope). Nothing beautiful will come of
this. Our state does not like beauty.
Nor
does it need teachers. It needs agents, and on the cheap. You too,
children, will become agents by virtue of reading and writing. That is
the worm in the apple: The state teaches reading and in exchange one has
to read its texts. And when you learn literature you will read again,
like in bible lessons, like in nature class and in geography lessons,
the same thing. The separate strands will wrap around and together
thread the budding Zionist.
You
will read all the texts, each year, and the principal will bang on
about the heroes and the victims – you. Always. In every lesson. And
what the soldiers did in the night to the children of the refugee camps
on the West Bank? You will not know that.
From
time to time your parents will hear on the news how the ultra-Orthodox
children aren’t being required to take core studies. They will be angry,
but also feel pride. “What are core studies, Daddy?” “What we learn,
and they don’t!” But everything you will learn after the reading and
writing can be learned in the last three months of high school in 12
years’ time. What cannot be learned in three months is this patriotic
thing – to declaim slogans, to be blind and deaf to human suffering, to
be a trooper.
Here
is another part of the deal: School is a storage space where you are
held for 12 years because your parents have to go to work. The price of
storage – patriotic cultivation. It is for that that you will be
entering the gates of school on Thursday, to turn into dolts and to love
the state that has made this land ugly.
Yet
this moment, when you enter the school, is entirely one of hope. Here
is the world, very soon it will become explicated in written words, it
can be read in one way or another. And possibly even changed.
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