Report to the ... Zionist Congress and to the Council of the Jewish Agency in ... · 1937-08-01 · 8.1937 · p. Seite 41

— 41 — the dormitories stand within the limits of Yagur. The present pupils are all the wards of the Juedische Jugendhilfe. All these institutions are basically educational in character. They require no impetus from the outside to bring them up to the mark pedagogically. The teaching personnel is keenly concerned with the peculiar needs of boys and girls transplanted to new soil and new conditions, the most significant of which is the new language to be acquired. It is otherwise in the Kibbutz. There the atmosphere is not primarily pedagogic. A system has had to be worked out for it and its application watched at every turn. Moreover its educational facilities were adjusted, in all but the few places in which the Kibbuts already owned children of adolescent age, to the requirements of younger pupils. Thus the teaching had to be raised from the elementary to the secondary grades. Although the kibbutsim responded to the needs of the adolescent boys and girls from Germany immediately and intelligently, they had to be assisted in their endeavours to establish this supplementary schooling system. For this purpose, it was resolved to strengthen the organisation of the leaders of the youth groups. Partly they are teachers in the educational system of Palestine, partly they are the leaders who came from Germany with the young immigrants with whom they had been associated in their Youth Organisations. The organisation came into existence soon after the beginning of the Movement and was recognised by the central administration as an official body whose advice on pedagogical matters was considered of substantial value. It arranged conferences from time to time, at which the educational problems of Youth Immigration members were discussed and a curriculum outlined. During the past year this Leaders' Organisation has been given a more definite official status. A committee of five was put in charge, one of whom acts as centraliser and intermediary between the centre and the Kibbutsim on pedagogic questions. The periodic conferences of the leaders have been given more systematic content, and in addition to them a Seminar of a week's duration was held in February of this year at Tel-Aviv. The purpose of the latter was to enter more thoroughly than is possible at the brief conferences into methods of