Tilling the land, cultivating one’s self

From Dimona in the South to Kiryat Shmona in the North, agricultural schools teach schoolchildren life lessons through closeness to the soil. Metro interviewed three of these schools.

In Petah Tikva’s long-standing educational farm, most of the students come from nonreligious public schools. The agricultural school attached to the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens hosts Jewish students of all streams, who study and work side by side with Arab students. In Mateh Binyamin Regional Council’s Siach Hasadeh school, all the students are observant Jews. Common values and goals drive each school, although their student populations are wildly diverse.

David Kadish, director of the Petah Tikva school, explained how the agricultural education system began.

In the state’s early days, and even before independence, each school had its small farm dedicated to teaching city kids about agriculture.

With time, land became scarcer and more expensive. As school buildings expanded, there was less land for farming spaces. To continue their agricultural programs, schools needed budgets for equipment like irrigation pipes and tractors, not to mention trained teachers. Above all, they needed land. But budgets and farmland were shrinking.

Recognizing those needs, in the 1950s the state pooled resources to form the agricultural school system that obtains to this day. Local schools bus classes, ranging from kindergarten to high-school ages, to the educational farms, where the kids spend two to four hours weekly learning agriculture from work with living plants in the fields and nurseries.

Ecology studies include raising hydroponic crops, composting and recycling.

A visitor to an agricultural school will find the students weeding field crops or potting cuttings at outdoor dirt stations for the nurseries. If it rains or the weather’s too hot for outdoor activity, they’ll be in the classrooms hearing talks and watching instructional videos. You might glimpse the younger children drawing or doing easy recycling projects, or find the older ones at the computers, summing up research projects. All get a share of the vegetables they grew to take home.

At this time, there are 48 such agricultural schools working with the Education Ministry and local authorities. They have between two and five hectares on which to plant and build their greenhouses. The oldest schools were originally located on the edges of the towns they serve, but today many find themselves surrounded by busy streets and tall buildings. Some face the danger of shrinking away, as did the schools of early times, because their lands are on valuable real estate.

Kadish says, “This farm was just outside of Petah Tikva in the 1950s. Getting here was daunting: there were jackals, foxes and scratchy thornbushes.

Now we’re an oasis in the middle of town, and what’s daunting about getting here is avoiding the traffic on the street.”

The Petah Tikva school, which Kadish often refers to as “the farm,” was founded in 1934 by Rosa Cohen, the mother of former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

“Ninety percent of the population was working on the land at the time,” recounts Kadish. “Our school answered the country’s political and ideological need to combine work and education – agricultural education. It drew top grade-school students, some of whom went on to advanced studies at the Kadourie and Mikve Yisrael schools.

It functioned for 14 years. Hundreds of students passed through the school. Some became leaders in culture, economics and politics, such as Rabin, Rehavam Ze’evi and Rafael Eitan.”

The Petah Tikva school closed temporarily in 1948, as all the students joined the army. It reopened as an educational farm in 1952. It’s a national heritage site, with its original buildings, like the chicken coop and toolshed, restored together with the Council of Preservation of Heritage Sites in Israel.

Every week, over 2,500 schoolkids rotate between the 10 branches of study, which include an apiary and an enclosed organic nursery. For the older students, research, conducted in the greenhouses and summed up on the computers, encourages original and organized thinking.

Teachers are agronomists with master’s degrees, about a third of whom have training in teaching special needs students. All the agricultural schools Metro interviewed receive special needs classes.

“Special-needs students don’t build the farm agriculturally, but the farm builds them,” says Kadish. “Here, they have work they can excel at, in contrast to places where they experience failure all the time, or are rejected out of hand. Working according to their abilities and talents, whether in the fields or pickling olives, or making herbal ointments, or on the computers, the kids absorb lessons of correct behavior, teamwork and being organized – all of which boosts their independence and self-esteem, and will help them in their futures.”

A unique feature of the Petah Tikva school is the activities sponsored for the elders of the Ethiopian community. The elders were farmers, considered authorities in the old country. Immigrating to a city, they lost the status they held in the social hierarchy. But in Petah Tikva, Ethiopian elders of both sexes have had two dunams (0.2 hectares) on which to cultivate familiar vegetables and spices; a place to hold meetings and bake injera bread from teff grain they grow themselves; a place where they can gather and celebrate events, such as the teff harvest and the Sigd festival. The school helped them build a representative village, with a gojo – the traditional round house made of mud – at its center. Two Ethiopian beehives, also made of mud, stand among the 15 white beehive boxes in the apiary. Unlike the schoolchildren with their scheduled visits, the elders come and go freely. The school encourages the students to talk to the elders and learn from them.

The agricultural school in the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens also has a long history. Founded in 1954 on Yehuda Street, it moved to the Botanical Gardens in 2000. Fifty-two classes from 25 local schools attend classes there.

It’s the most eclectic of the three schools Metro interviewed. The kids represent all the streams of Jewry, plus Arab schoolchildren from the Silwan area. The different classes work side by side and often begin spontaneous conversations. For many students, it’s their first exposure to the other.

The school enjoys the facilities of the Botanical Gardens’ 25 hectares, and has about 0.4 hectares to work on. There are 10 teachers and four classrooms on site. A typical visit will start with a talk, followed by fieldwork, then summing up the lessons. The children visit the farm once weekly for one to three years.

Activities are scheduled to reflect the seasons and upcoming holidays. The management is sensitive to each population’s mores. For example, there is an Arabic-speaking teacher who works with the Arab children at their holiday times. Haredi Jewish children are separated by sex, with teachers of the appropriate gender for each class. In the shmita (sabbatical) year, planting and potting take place in containers that don’t touch the ground.

There is one high school class that studies for a five-point matriculation in agricultural studies: a special-ed class of autistic kids. Last year, the class had a 100% success rate.

Research takes the teenagers through creating tables and graphics, data-gathering and learning to measure all aspects of plant growth.

Iris Asher, director, says, “The kids love and wait for farm day. They learn to cooperate, to work as a team and get results.”

Research is important in this school, too. Currently there are classes working with the Botanical Gardens’ research into plants that thrive in Mediterranean climates globally, and preserving heritage varieties. Echoing Kadish’s words, Asher adds, “They learn lessons that will stand by them in the future.”

The Siach Hasadeh agricultural school in Mateh Binyamin has perhaps the most spiritual agenda. Yossi Yitzhaki, director, says, “All Israel needs to learn agriculture on the land. Every good thing began in farming, whether it be culture, industry or medicine. Connecting life and humanity to agriculture is a way to preserve the world in peace. The metaphor of ‘beating swords into plowshares’ shows this perfectly.” The school has an agricultural beit midrash (center for religious studies), headed by a rabbi who is also an agronomist.

But if so far it sounds like it’s all spiritual and no physical at Siach Hasadeh, consider the impressive list of activities. Boys and girls learn experimental agriculture; raise vegetables and flowers in the fields; attend talks and work in the nursery and greenhouse; cultivate biblical plants for spices, medicine and fragrance, and conduct biotope and ecotope research in the lab. There is a vineyard for wine and table grapes, as well as an olive grove whose fruit the students press for oil and pickle for eating. The school also offers students’ families individual plots for cultivating out of school hours.

The stated goal of Siach Hasadeh is to make the connection between agricultural Halacha and hands-on practice. Within this concept, the students learn about the interaction between man and the environment through ecological studies.

Innovative recycling teaches the students to make use of all resources, such as used car tires.

Special-needs students have access to therapeutic gardening and projects appropriate to their abilities.

The school conducts tree-planting events and conservation studies together with Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund and the Agriculture Ministry.

For students wishing to continue advanced agricultural studies, there is a matriculation program in the fields of plants and animals.

VIPs who have visited Siach Hasadeh include Education Minister Naftali Bennett and Safed Chief Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, both of whom planted trees at the school. Eliyahu enthusiastically sowed wheat in a school field.

Connecting to the land is a rare experience for today’s students. The agricultural schools have students not only raise vegetables but also develop values. There are lessons that come of themselves, too. The children learn the satisfaction of old-fashioned physical labor. They communicate face-to-face instead of relying on electronic devices. And they open their minds to people’s diversity in society. You might see kids tilling a field, but they’re also absorbing a load of values.

Tilling the land, cultivating one’s self

Israel’s agricultural schools connect kids to nature, history and society