Customer Reviews

The Children of the Dream

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I read this very well written book describing an early kibbutz in Israel many years ago, when it was first published. Bettelheim's careful and fascinating description of life in this kibbutz and the impact of the lifestyle there on the children of the kibbutz, as well as the adults, seemed complete and led to considerable information concerning the needs of children and families in a small society and how these needs can be met, while at the same time meeting the needs of adults in a situation where women, as well as men, participate in the real work of the community. Much of what he described in the kibbutz could be highly relevant to us, given our modern social difficulties. given the need of most families for two incomes, the breakdown of our sense of belonging to communities and the alarming response of many children left to their own devices as they find themselves lost in searching for a road to adulthood and survival in an increasingly complex world. While the early kibbutz is not appropriate as it existed as a literal answer to our difficulties, we can possibly gain many ideas from this book that we can adapt in our efforts to overcome much of the social disruption that we find in our lives. With this in mind, I would hope that this book might find renewal in reprint soon, as its readership might at this time be far wider than it was when it was it was originally published. Sharan M. Ramsauer, Ph.D.bru

For this book, Bettelheim interviewed several teenage kids from kibbutz Ramat Yohanan. One of them told him he'd like to be a fighter pilot and a nuclear physicist. Bettelheim concluded that kibbutz education teaches kids to have unrealistic expectations, and wrote as much in his book.

As it happens, the boy in question, Kobi Richter, went on to become a fighter pilot and a squadron leader in the Israeli air force, then did a science doctorate in Israel and a post-doc in MIT. He founded several high-tech companies and today heads Medinol, a maker of state-of-the-art medical stents (They just won a big settlement from Boston Scientific for breaching their patents)

Bettelheim was using an interpreter, so he should have taken extra care. He failed to recognize a exceptional talent, and wrote baseless generalizations founded on incorrect data. Some kibbutzniks say this is typical of his book - he came over for a few months, formed superficial opinions through a language barrier, and hastened to publish.

Bruno Bettelheim, once the star among educators and sociologists, has been widely discredited in recent years. When I first read this book, I sense what was coming; I expected that Bettelheim was going to "reveal" whether the Kibbutz was a model utopia or a failed experiment. What he "reveals" is that the children born to the Kibbitz are emotionally sterile and can't experience or provide love and happiness.
Bettelheim's research was not enough. He must have gone (by taxi) to a Kibbutz, chatted with the residents, and left. He didn't go deep enough into the questions of sexuality, intimacy, and development that obviously fascinated him. There is more than one Kibbutz in Israel, and some are more spartan than others. Some have families living in private quarters, while others require that the children sleep together in a dormitory, not with their parents.

The bottom line is, Bettelheim traded on his fame. Few educators take his work seriously anymore.