Half of Tel Aviv school principals to boycott gender-separated games event

An unholy row is brewing in the secular capital of Israel, Tel Aviv, where half the elementary school principals are threatening to boycott a citywide sports event because the Education Ministry has ruled that it should be gender separated, the Haaretz newspaper reported Monday.

The event, due to take place on May 9 in Ramat Gan’s national park, near Tel Aviv, will feature “games of yesteryear” such as hopscotch, Chinese jump ropes [sometimes known as elastics], dodge ball and jump rope skipping.

A week ago, 28 principals — roughly half of those in Tel Aviv — signed a letter to Guy Dagan, the national inspector for physical education, saying that as they strove every day to close gender gaps, ordering blanket gender separation for the event was”unacceptable,” objectified children’s bodies, widened gender gaps in Israeli society and did not serve the communities they represented.

“It’s our responsibility and duty to prove to the pupils in our schools that there is no room for gender differences in education, development, creativity and personal and social skills,” the letter said.

It also pointed out that while there were gender differences in aspects of competitive athletics, they were irrelevant where traditional schoolyard games were concerned.

The principals suggested separating girls from boys only for activities where the participants specifically requested it.

But while he agreed with the spirit of the letter “in principle,” Dagan responded that the event was also supposed to serve state religious schools, where classes are gender-separated from elementary level onwards.

It was important, he said, to take into consideration the “characteristics” of the population and the agreement of all participating schools, as well as the issue of “body images of boys and girls at these ages.”

Also he said, there was not enough time to make changes now. He promised that a professional committee would look into the issue in the run-up to the next school year.

One principal who signed the letter told Haaretz that gender separation was “coercion in the full force of the word. In the name of taking into so-called account a religious minority, the secular majority is being told to change its behavior. The parents at my school won’t agree to that.”

Tel Aviv Deputy Mayor Asaf Zamir, who holds the city’s education portfolio, said, “There’s an enormous gap between the desire to consider ‘the other’ and their needs and the imposition of these needs on an absolute majority of the city’s students, in total contradiction to their worldview and even contrary to the values ​​of equality towards which we educate them.

“It’s impossible to accept the Education Ministry’s decision in a city that has championed equality.”

The Education Ministry is headed by Naftali Bennett, chairman of the nationalist Jewish Home party, who, while pushing to strengthen subjects such as math and English, has said, “Learning about Judaism and excellence in the subject is more important in my eyes than mathematics and the sciences.”

When he was previously in control of the Religious Services Ministry, Bennett created a Jewish Identity Administration. The Tel Aviv Municipality cut contact with the administration a year ago.