AMERICAN JEWISH EDUCATION: AN ENGLISH VIEW.

This essay will attempt a description of Jewish education in America, a subject about which outside that country comparatively little is known even by experienced Jewish educationists. The subject by itself is of real interest, but it may also be of some practical importance in our efforts to evaluate Jewish education in England and improve its standards. All authoritative observers are agreed that there is much to support the thesis that the present generation of American Jewish children receive a better Jewish education than their parents ever did. Like most other special aspects of American Jewish life this has to be examined within the general background of the development of the whole of Jewish life in that country. Not least among the areas of American Jewish life is the effort now being made in the field of Jewish education. Fifty years ago there was Virtually only one kind of organized public Jewish educational institution and that was the "Talmud Torah." A word may be added here about the efforts being made in the sphere of adult Jewish education. In general, the pattern of the adult education group is not very different from what one might find in the best and most active of our Anglo-Jewish synagogues, except perhaps that in America they are more intense and are adequately financed.