How Vision is Used in Visions of Jewish Education

We offer some initial principles for our use of the term “vision” in the "Introduction" and in "Envisioning Jewish Education" in Visions of Jewish Education (pages 8-9), in Seymour Fox's chapter "The Art of Translation" (pages 253-56) and in Daniel Marom's chapter, "Before the Gates of the School: An Experiment in Developing Educational Vision from Practice" (pages 296-98).

In his teaching of Visions of Jewish Education, Project Director Daniel Marom refers to three aspects of our definition of vision.  He identifies the key characteristics of vision as we use it in this project: it is education-specific, drawing on Lawrence Cremin’s idea of education as intervention; it is related to our perception that the perennial ills of Jewish education are symptoms of a deeper problem; and it implies a belief that vision requires a community.

A common misunderstanding of our approach is that it moves only from theory to practice, that theory must first be developed in a zone outside of practice and then translated into a blueprint for one-time implementation.

A central tenet of our concept of vision is that it works both from practice to theory and from theory to practice. 

This dialectical relationship between theory and practice was explicated by Israel Scheffler in his interpretation of John Dewey’s philosophy (see an excerpt from Scheffler’s Four Pragmatists [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974]).  Scheffler focuses on Dewey’s distinction “between the end as actual outcome of a course of action, and the end-in-view as the envisaged end which currently serves to direct activity” (page 229).

As Marom’s "Before the Gates of the School: An Experiment in Developing Educational Vision from Practice" demonstrates, our conception works with a much more complex set of assumptions about the relationship between theory and practice.  Theory can in fact be drawn from practice through evaluation of unsuccessful practice, through portraits of vision-guided practice or in a continuous, ongoing discourse.

Given this dialectical relationship there are nevertheless discrete steps in moving from practice to theory and theory to practice.  Identifying these steps and thinking through their implications for the design and practice of education has been a central and ongoing occupation of the project.

Seymour Fox has focused on this task.  He identifies at least five levels on the dialectical continuum between philosophy and practice in education.  These are described in his Vision at the Heart: Lessons from Camp Ramah (Jerusalem: The Mandel Institute, 1997), a passage of which is excerpted here.