Researchers have long recognized that schools are powerful environments for shaping students' worldview and identity. The structured content, activities, and resultant culture of schools profoundly impact the way in which students learn to make sense of the world around them. In the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community this function of schooling is prominently visible, as the overall worldview of the community is in many ways inconsistent with that of modern secular society, and often stands out in sharp contrast. This dissertation uses ultra-Orthodox elementary schools as a platform to explore issues of worldview formation. In this work I argue that the central purpose of elementary education in the ultra-Orthodox community is the inculcation of the ultra-Orthodox worldview. This is accomplished through a comprehensive religious education oriented around apprenticeship into communal practices and beliefs, rather than the acquisition of conventional content knowledge, along with a traditional secular education that is conceptually isolated and restricted in content, whose purpose is limited to the acquisition of basic skills necessary to function in daily life. To make this argument, I use a novel conception of worldview, wherein worldview emerges from the activities individuals engage in and the beliefs they maintain. This conception is then used to demonstrate how the activities and beliefs presented in the school day work in concert with the students' home lives to instill in the students a sense that the world must be assessed in terms of its accordance with a specific model of the good life, that is, the correct and proper way to live.

Last modified

• 09/06/2018

Creator

• Moshe Krakowski

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2H141

Subject

• Education and Social Policy - Learning Sciences

Keyword

• worldview
• Jewish Studies
• socialization
• activity
• cognition

Date created

• 2008-04-24

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright