The Knesset Plenum late Monday night passed a law which annuls the requirement to teach the “Core Curriculum” in Haredi schools. The government-sponsored bill was merged with a proposal submitted by MK Moshe Gafni (United Torah Judaism) and a group of Knesset members.
41 MKs voted in favor of the amendment to the curriculum law in its second and third readings, and 28 opposed. The curriculum law, submitted by the Yesh Atid party in 2013, aimed to slash state funding for some Haredi institutions down to 35% from the 55% of the budgets that Israeli schools that comply with the core curriculum requirement receive.
Instead of requiring the Haredi schools to teach 10 to 11 hours of secular studies per week, as the Yesh Atid law stipulated, the new law now gives the Education Minister the authority to fund these institutions, regardless of their attention to subjects like English as a second language, math, and the sciences.
It should be noted that those Haredi schools that rejected the government-imposed of a Core Curriculum did so not necessarily because they object to teaching their students many of the subjects on the list, but the very idea that a secular authority insert itself into the intellectual and, inevitably, spiritual milieu of their students. Teaching of “secular studies” is practiced in most Haredi educational institutions around the world.