Preparing the educational syst
Preparing the educational systThe great turmoil that the Yom Kippur War brought about, the extended State of Emergency that had followed, the hostile terrorist and the uncertainty that had accompanied the steps of peace, brought the educational system onto confronting new challenges. Emotional pressures that related to the state of security, were no more the sole domain of the friction-zone residents. What I mean is the inevitable pressures our children were exposed to via the media’s description of the events, public mobilization exercises, Civil Defense exercises in the school, lethal terrorist activities, security checks at the entrances of amusement parks, the father’s departure for reserve service, conversations of adults in their vicinity, etc. Besides the threat in the form of physical strength in a period as such, the child experiences a threat, although less noticeable on the surface, but significant regarding his mental development: the dimness of the situation and the need to act in states of uncertainty.
The effects of national stress situations on children were, mainly, diagnosed by Anna Freud and Dorothy Birlingham (1942), at the time of the Blitz in England, by Kleiman (1968) and Kleiman (1975) regarding the murder of President Kennedy in the United States of America. In Israel it was executed by Ziv et al (Ziv, Krogalensky and Shulman, 1972; Ziv and Israeli 1973), who examined the level of stress with children of bombarded settlements. Freud and Birlingham found that children who were disconnected from their families and had been evacuated to safe places out of London developed a higher level of anxiety than the children whom had stayed in town with their parents and had experienced and observed the bombardments and the devastation. Ziv et al found differences in the level of anxiety of children in bombarded townships and children, whose towns were not bombarded, but they did not find such a difference between children of bombarded kibbutz and non-bombarded kibbutz, and in a catharsis of stress situations that is enabled by discussions on the subject between the adults and the kids.
From here stems the need for enforcing the level of the school’s level of organization, in improving the readiness of the educational staff in dealing with the predicted difficulties. As well as in insuring the readiness of the team itself in dealing with stress situations. The latter would all help in strengthening the system and assisting the teacher in being a source of support for his students.
We must regard the preparation of the system with utmost importance. The students’ mental solidity depends on this preparation, as well as the...
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