Last week, we published five essays answering the question “What’s next for CAJE?” We invited readers to send us their thoughts. This is one of several responses we received from TAPBB readers.
by Peter Stark
The announcement that there would be no CAJE conference this coming year is sad, but it is the inevitable conclusion of the drift of the organization away from the vision of teacher support and teacher participation. There is certainly nothing wrong with principal participation nor with principal support, or lay person support, but there are other organizations with that mission.
The new American Colors of Limmud, meanwhile, are springing up like wildflowers, and more power to them. Their mission is Jewish learning, one CAJE shared, but one which CAJE transcended, because CAJE was (I hate writing about CAJE in the past tense!) an organization for Jewish education, not only for Jewish learning.
The purpose of these comments is to not to dwell upon the past, but (the phrase is Churchill’s) to lay the lessons of the past before the future. In other words, to look at some critical turning points along the way to where we are in order to chart a course toward building a future. They reflect my own opinions and perhaps those of others, but they are being written only by me at one go as a reaction to the news.
There were several episodes of handwriting on the wall.
The first was the alteration of the title of CAJE from Conference on Alternatives in Jewish Education to Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education. This was a step backward, toward the very models which served the background for the founding of CAJE as an ALTERNATIVE organization. If CAJE had begun as the CONFERENCE OF SAME OLD CONFERENCES, I wonder how many people would have attended the first conferences. And the business school exercise of arguing about name changes and writing new goal statements as a way of creating the illusion of participatory democracy while the real decisions are taken by a powerful elite contributed to the current economic malaise as well as to the sad news about CAJE.
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