The threat of the strike has been removed, let's talk about expectations.
Not salary expectations - expectations from the education system.
Not the discussion of teachers' salary or the question of seniority was absent from the last negotiation - and not only the last one - but a discussion of the role of the education system.
We no longer expect her to just wait for our children in the basics of English, mathematics and humanities.
We expect it to be a comprehensive system that gives every student a holistic response - academic, social, emotional, moral, civic and even health-related.
Every area where we fail as parents and as a society, we burden the education system: to teach our children manners and manners, Jewish heritage and democratic values, equality, climate and mindfulness, sexual education and solidarity.
Educational programs for schools are popping up left and right, and in the database of the Ministry of Education there are no less than 19,039 different types of programs that schools can adopt.
Everyone wants to meet school students, enjoy the captive audience and beat the children with soft values.
In recent years, we have also seen many initiatives from within the education system: a program to encourage recruitment, a program to encourage healthy eating, a program to encourage bottle recycling, a program to strengthen the bond between humans and animals, a program to recognize and study different gender identities, and the list is endless.
Anyone with enough influence or money creates an "educational program" and strives to change the lives of Israeli students forever.
But Israeli students study for a total of six to seven hours a day with teachers who earn a salary that is at most reasonable, in a starved system that the copy budgets that flow into it never seep into the field.
These are the hard figures at the moment, and they will remain so until there is a minister here who is willing to do in education what Netanyahu did in finance, and bring about change even at the cost of political suicide.
We expect teachers to be a combination of lecturer, psychologist, scout guide, coach and gate preacher.
The time has come for more modest demands.
I would like to make a revolutionary proposal: the role of the education system should be narrowly defined and not expanded.
Her role is to teach our children math, English, science, heritage and the humanities, and to do so in a way that allows even students from weak backgrounds to succeed.
It can and should be done in a creative, innovative, versatile way, adapted to the culture or lifestyle - there is nothing sacred in the structure of a classroom that sits and stares at the blackboard - but the educational act within the walls of the school should be pedagogical in its essence.
Nutrition is important, recycling is important, animals are important - but in a system that actually has such limited resources, we must define the boundaries of the sector.
Value content can and should enter the curriculum, but we must not forget the well-known Talmudic rule that I still remember from the days when it was hanging on the classroom wall: You caught a lot - you didn't catch.
were we wrong
We will fix it!
If you found an error in the article, we would appreciate it if you shared it with us