They were at Mount Hermon, but they have no idea how to locate it on a map. They’re not sure if the Lower
Galilee is in the south or the north, or to what part of Israel
Beersheva belongs to. These are high school students in the Israeli educational system. Guides from the KKL-JNF Educational Department report that Israeli high school students have a basic lack of familiarity with the map of the land of Israel, to the point that even if they want to find
Jerusalem on the map, they have no idea where the capital is located.
According to Aharon Bar, Director of the
KKL-JNF Pedagogic Department, about 100,000 students have participated over the past five years in educational activities related to the map of the land of Israel, and at least 70 percent of them were incapable or had great difficulty in identifying and locating regions of the country and towns on the map.
“We found that the students lack an appropriate basic understanding, and they don’t know directions or regions in Israel,” Bar warns. “They can’t identify the location of Jerusalem, they don’t identify
Alexander River, they don’t know where Beersheva is, they can’t differentiate between Lower and Upper Galilee. They visited Lake Kinneret, but they don’t know where it is. These students are about to enlist in the IDF, and someone not familiar with their country can’t really defend it.”
Filling the gap of this basic lack of knowledge are the KKL-JNF Educational Department guidance teams who operate the “
educational activity mobile” – a special vehicle that comes to classrooms, schoolyards, community centers, youth group clubhouses and also to forests throughout the country, bringing the children a variety of educational activities related to the
environment,
nature, history and Zionism. The activities are combined with games, kits and diverse content. The goal is to hold field activities, and to teach the students the basic concepts they often lack while they have a good time.
One of the central activities of the educational activity-mobile focuses on the map of Israel. At the center of the activity is a huge map, on which towns and villages, regions, streams, sites,
water reservoirs and
forests are marked. Students learn to become familiar with the location of the various sites on the map and to mark, with the help of special little flags, the names of the spots according to the instructions of the counselor.
According to Bar, at the beginning of the activity one can identify big gaps in the students’ knowledge and orientation, who even fill out a “blind map”, but as the activity continues they learn to identify the different geographic regions and to draw the map of the land of Israel. “This is an ecological celebration,” he said.