The Associated, …show more content…
The confusion between programs and outcomes can be attributed to inexperience with education, but knowledgeable staff members do not push for clarity. Probably people avoid talking about what education should do because they assume differences are irreconcilable, and talking specifically seems not only futile, but dangerous. The chair and others talk about whether there is consensus on certain issues, whether, in effect, the staff is authorized to draft Later, Stein and a staff member agree they don’t hear consensus on basic issues, but the staff is authorized to fill out the …show more content…
Thus the history of strategic planning for Jewish education shows four years in which the majority could neither come to agreement with the minority nor defeat them. Strategic planning was an effort to subsume the politics of budgetary interests under agreed-on principles and priorities. Instead, political and psychological interests in unanimity led the non-Orthodox majority to move their conflicts with the largely Orthodox minority behind the scenes to a realm of interest-group politics. While the rhetoric of strategic planning implies rationality, the reality of frightening differences and unacknowledged emotions drives politics. When even small differences arouse anxiety, it is easier to attack right-wing Orthodox, civil Jews, unaffiliated, or intermarried as dangers to the community than it is to grapple with a mixture of similarities and