Talmud, Curriculum, and The Practical

The Author: Alan A. Block was a high school teacher for eighteen years, and presently is Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. He is the author of three previous books, and has published extensively on matters of curriculum and classroom practice. He is a member of Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, Minnesota.

«This lovely book is a great relief. Alan Block’s words reaffirm for me a terrible amnesia in education. We have forgotten how deeply formed we are by our spiritual ancestries and blood-lines, with all the ghosts and hopes and dreams that haunt such formation. This is a book of deep, sometimes troubled, sometimes troubling remembering: rooting the work of Joseph Schwab back into the ages of Judaism. ‘Talmud, Curriculum, and the Practical: Joseph Schwab and the Rabbis’ is not only itself an act of great rabbinic scholarship. It is an act of great courage to say out loud and in such loving detail what we already know: that our images and understanding of language, our love of the word, and our energetic concerns over the shape and nature of interpretation, our sometimes near-panic over the fragile and blossoming lives of our children (their ‘course’, their ‘curriculum’) comes from somewhere that is richer, more complex, more difficult, more interesting and more ancient than the bare bones of what often counts as educational theory. Read this. It is a beautiful work.» (Dr. David Jardine, Professor of Education, University of Calgary)«On the surface, the concept of a curriculum is rather simple. But, thanks largely to Joseph Schwab, the question of curriculum grew from simply ‘What do students learn’ to ‘How do students learn the skills of learning?’ In this book Alan Block demonstrates the important place of Jewish roots in Schwab’s theory of curriculum. Citing examples from the Talmud and Jewish classical literature, Dr. Block clearly ties the classic method of Jewish dyadic learning to the methodology which Schwab championed.» (Rabbi Paul Drazen, Executive Director)