Intensive Teacher Training for Hebrew Day Schools Urged at Parley

An appeal for an intensive teacher training program to provide the specially skilled educators needed for Hebrew day schools throughout the United State and Canada was made here today at the annual convention of the National Conference of Yeshiva Principals by Rabbi Joseph Elias, of Detroit, president of the organization.

Stressing the need “for a qualitative growth in day schools to match the quantitative growth over the past decade,” Rabbi Elias told the delegates that “as more highly trained teachers become available, we will be able to raise our educational standards so that the day schools will have an even greater impact on our children.” He cited the teacher shortage as “the major obstacle in the path of an even more rapid rate of growth in the movement over the next five years.”

The day school educators were urged at the convention to give increasing attention to the physical training needs of their pupils, in line with President Kennedy’s program for physical fitness among the nation’s youth. Dr. Ephraim Wolf, a member of the executive board of the Conference, proposed that the schools inaugurate physical fitness tests to measure “the endurance capacity and limitations” of the pupils’ physical performance, and that “physical education be made compulsory from the earliest grades.”