The duty of the education system is not only to teach students how to think but also to guide them on what to think. This is the greatest form of protection. 

One of the things I particularly enjoyed doing as a civics teacher was walking into a class, usually teaching the older grade, with two opinion pieces in my bag: one from Haaretz representing a left-wing perspective, and another from Israel Hayom presenting the other side of the political spectrum. 

Those 45 minutes were pure bliss as I watched anger, arguments, raised voices, and restless movement in the chairs. If I had a special tool to observe, I would probably see how the students’ neural wiring clashed and fought with the patterns of thinking they were so familiar with. 

That’s what I was looking for: training. To train the muscles of listening, patience, tolerance, and restraint. To stretch their attention to places that were hardest for them to handle—moving away from their comfort zone, which consisted of the opinion that was easiest and most pleasant for them. 

When I first entered my office as a high school principal, I searched for one sentence to hang on the wall, something connected to my educational philosophy and life perspective. Finally, I found it in Albert Einstein’s quote: “The goal of education should be to develop individuals who excel in both independent thought and action, and at the same time see serving the public good as their primary mission.” 

The first part of Einstein’s sentence troubled me deeply. I saw daily how my students were “locked” in their personal, family, and social biographies, unable to tell an independent and new story about their lives. 

The year 2023 has been one of the most difficult years for Israeli society, and it continues to disturb my thoughts. It’s not the disagreement that troubles me- the debate of ideas in any society is crucial—but the intensity of polarization, division, hatred, and tribalism. 

More disturbing than the ideas themselves are the tools through which these ideas are transmitted. The channels that feed our consciousness. The tool has become the message. 

The social network is the message, it is the influencer, the divider, the one that doesn’t allow for independent thought, that doesn’t allow the freedom of well-reasoned opinions. More than anything, I believe that the “protection week” (in schools) should address this point. The education system is the most important player in this battle. It will determine the ability of future generations to critique, judge, weigh, and reflect when facing the “menu” presented to them in social media. 

As part of the educational language in the “Atid” network, we believe that in order for a student or a staff member to be a meaningful player, the community of meaning must develop a mechanism of “choice architecture” that will make it easier for a person to become a meaningful player. The education system must teach its students and staff that this “choice architecture” also exists in social networks. And those who design it have one major goal: to get you to stay in the network or app for as long as possible, to essentially get you addicted. 

So what is this architecture? The engineered algorithm will do everything to ensure that your time spent in the social network is enjoyable. Among other things, it will track your “digital footprints.” For example, if you write a sentence in favor or against the judicial reform, it will know to show you opinions that align with your views every time you log in. Not because the algorithm designers care about the judicial reform in Israel, but because what really matters to them is that you stay in the social media for as long as possible, getting hooked. 

The result is disastrous: the user’s world on social media narrows. The scope of their knowledge shrinks to the size of the opinions they already know. Their social world becomes locked into a circle of people who share only their views. And this is the fast lane to polarization and hatred, as we experienced during the first nine months of 2023, until the cursed morning of October 7th woke us up from the algorithmic slumber we had fallen into. 

The duty of the education system is not only to teach how to think, but also to provide direction on what to think. This is the greatest form of protection. It is crucial to shine a large flashlight in front of students to show them that there is a giant, engineered system at play, and to equip them with the tools for self-criticism. If we return to Einstein’s quote, we must give students the tools to develop independent thinking: to understand that someone has created a “menu” for them, but it’s not the truth, and they must develop constant vigilance to check if they want to consume what is being offered on that menu. They should be taught to click away and seek out a restaurant with a broader, more diverse menu. 

In 2023, Israel faced the threat of fragmentation. It seemed that the battle was purely ideological, but it wasn’t. The idea was the foam on a stormy sea. What put Israel in danger was the polarization and tribalism. 

Teaching online safety is, in essence, protecting Israeli society. And, as Einstein wrote, teaching our students to think independently is ultimately contributing to a strong, stable, and diverse Israeli society.