Assessing Faith: The Gift We Owe Our Students

Assessing Faith: The Gift We Owe Our Students

Faith is one example of a “non-testable” priority that Jewish day schools have. In a recent article for 18Forty, Hillel Rapp identifies inspiration as one of the four pillars of Jewish high school. If educating for inspiration, or faith, is as important as academic learning, it is actually essential for schools to find some way to assess and report on the progress, at the time that it’s happening. Otherwise, we run the risk of telling students that this is a core part of our purpose, while showing them that we actually only care about math and science. To be sure, I am not suggesting that we give students a grade on faith. Instead, we need to get back to the core of the purpose of assessment and then use that information to set goals for future growth.

Sacred Texts

Sacred Texts

I’ve never considered myself to be much of a spiritual person. It takes a lot to “inspire” me, and I am both skeptical and critical of the neo-spiritual movements that seem to be growing in popularity. So, it took me a while to warm to the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, a critical reading of the Harry Potter series by a pair of graduates from Harvard Divinity School. Their basic premise was that if you read a text, in a community, with rigor and commitment, it can yield meaningful spiritual value. They choose from a variety of spiritual practices, sourced from Christianity and Judaism, to focus on while reading each chapter of the series, looking for the meaning that emerges.

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