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Having spent forty years teaching education and philosophy at Harvard, and publishing widely on these topics during this period, Israel Scheffler has now written a more personal book, looking at education through the prism of his own early experience, primarily of religious learning.
The book consists mainly of portraits of his early teachers, most of whom belonged to a transitional generation of immigrant Hebrew scholars -- unsung heroes of Jewish education on the American scene. Through the medium of such portraits of teaching personalities and styles, as well as firsthand descriptions of various educational settings in the New York City of the 30s and 40s, he comments on aspects of immigrant life, the tensions between religious and secular worlds, the psychology of learning and teaching, the relations between universalism and particularism, the contrasts between intensive education and instrumental schooling, and related themes. These themes, although exemplified in the details of his own experience, are of quite general significance.
The book will be of special interest for those concerned with Jewish life, with religious education, with the immigrant experience and with the recent American past.
List of contents
Preface. Introduction. Mr. Savage. Reb. Public School. Rabbi Jacob Joseph School. Mr. Leideker. Teachers' Institute. Dr. Kaplan. Brooklyn College. Rabbi Shunfenthal. Beyond. Photograph Album. Endnotes. Index.
Summary
Having spent forty years teaching education and philosophy at Harvard, and publishing widely on these topics during this period, Israel Scheffler has now written a more personal book, looking at education through the prism of his own early experience, primarily of religious learning.
Report
` The book is both touching and telling in import and historical content. As a portrait of times past and nearly lost from memory or record, it is an important contribution to a chapter of American education. Actually, it is the story of the immigration of a style of religious education and its `two worlds' transformation in the New World. '
V.A. Howard, Harvard University
` This is a unique and uniquely valuable book. Scheffler is without question the most distinguished philosopher of education, at least in the English-speaking world, alive today. The book provides an affecting glimpse of `the man behind the ideas'. The book raises important questions which are at the center of philosophical and educational controversy, and frequently offers original and insightful answers to them. '
Harvey Siegel, University of Miami
