In Modernizing Jewish Education in Nineteenth Century Eastern Europe Mordechai Zalkin offers a new path through which the Eastern European traditional Jewish society underwent a rapid and significant process of modernization - the Maskilic system of education. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century a few local Jews, affected by the values and the principles of the European Enlightenment, established new private modern schools all around The Pale of Settlement, in which thousands Jewish boys and girls were exposed to different disciplines such as sciences and humanities, a process which changed the entire cultural structure of contemporary Jewish society.
Mordechai Zalkin, Ph.D. (1996), Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, is Professor of Modern Jewish History. He has published books and articles on the Jewish Enlightenment, the history of Lithuanian Jewry and the modernization of Jewish education.
Acknowledgement
Introduction
Chapter One: "The People Who Walk in Darkness"
Chapter Two: The Path to Enlightenment: Education
Chapter Three: Overcoming Obstacles
Chapter Four: The Maskilic School: The Vision
Chapter Five: The Child at the Center
Chapter Six: The Maskilic School: Ensuring the Future
Chapter Seven: The Teacher
Afterword: The Quiet Revolution
Bibliography
Index
All interested in modernization of Jewish education, the history of educational thought, the history of Jewish Enlightenment and those concerned with modern Jewish history.