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Dear Rabbi Berger,
Regarding the curriculum discussion, I may be able to offer a unique perspective. I taught in a US Jewish day school for three years, and now teach in a public religious high school in Israel. My experiences within two such very different systems has caused me to do a lot of thinking over the past several years, and I hope some of what I've found can be helpful to others.
I strongly sympathize with Rabbi Kramer's frustration about the disparity between Jewish and secular subjects in the US (in terms of curriculums). But the "secular" curriculums have all the vast advantages of being developed for the US public school system, versus the limmudei kodesh which are solely developed within private Jewish day schools with far fewer resources. So the disparity is really between private and public, not Torah versus secular. When I started teaching in Israeli public religious
schools I was overwhelmed (in a good way) by the clear curriculums,
teachers guides, and endless resources available in (nearly) every area of limmudei kodesh. This is opposed to the US, where I remember the "curriculum" for Tanakh given to me as a beginning teacher being an old xerox copy of a list of recommended Rashis to teach. The curriculum for gemara was more or less which perek to teach!
Israel has much more to offer in this way, but the US private system also has a major advantage: freedom. Each school can try to better meet the specific needs of its students. This is the positive side Tamar Fried mentioned, that curriculum can and should be be an "ongoing process." The downside of this is that it involves far too much work to do from scratch, and may traumatize beginning teachers of limmudei kodesh.
So I respectfully suggest the following: A mailing-list like this could
help solve the problem by posting a database with a variety of different curriculums (including Misrad ha-Hinnukh's) for Tanakh, dinim, gemara, etc. on various grade levels through high school, and then those in the "process" of curriculum development could choose the elements that best suite their needs from any or all of the available models.
Hope this helps.
Seth (Avi) Kadish
Amit Karmiel High School</HTML>
