A Swiss educator today envisioned a teacher as a “mediator” between available knowledge and his pupils rather than “the almighty and only dispenser of knowledge.” Dr. Robert Hari, director general of secondary education for Geneva, spoke at the 10th congress of the World Ort Union here. Urging democratization of the teaching process, he told the 250 delegates from 29 countries that allowances must be made for individual differences in the rate of absorbing knowledge. Another speaker, Rabbi Gilbert Klaperman, of Yeshiva University in New York, praised the Ort’s education program which provides youth with vocational and professional skills. “All education is a preparation for life,” he said. “Therefore, just as we finish our students with skills to be materialistically productive, we are honor bound as being in loco parentis to provide the skills for spiritual self-preservation as well.”
William Haber, president of the American ORT Federation, presented a resume of the 90-year history of ORT. The organization, which was formed in St. Petersburg in 1880 to train poverty-stricken Jews in Czarist Russia for agricultural and manual occupations, today operates a network of more than 700 training centers and schools in 22 countries around the world. He declared that among the many priorities in Jewish life, none was more urgent than useful education of our youth to equip them with skills. He said that while ORT remained basically a Jewish organization, there have been growing demands on it to make its personnel and services available for programs sponsored by various governmental and inter-governmental bodies to raise the industrial standards of developing countries.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
