About "Melach Haaretz"

The time period between the end of high school and the beginning of the army service is a period in which the most important decisions of a young man or woman’s life will be taken, and during that period their personalities begin to take shape. Therefore, the potential for self-improvement and progress is exceptional.

 

One important foundation lies at the base of the educational philosophy of Mecinat Melach HaAretz: The skills that most of the young adults graduating from high school have acquired are intellectual only.

 

The education system in Israel, despite all of its stated intentions to inculcate students with a strong values system, manages to do so only partially. Those graduating from high schools in Israel arrive at the period in their lives in which they are expected to protect and take part in the State of Israel without answers to the most basic of questions.

 

In the Mechina the students will ask themselves and together we will attempt to answer the questions every Israeli, and indeed every human being, must ask himself: Who am I? What do I want to do with my life? How do I understand my connection to the Jewish people? To the Jewish state? To the Jewish land?

 

The answer to these questions are difficult to find in books and do not appear on the bagrut test. We believe that the key to finding the answers lie in different skills from the ones learned in a classic school setting: experiential and emotional skills, skills learned through personal example, through walking the paths of Israel and through conversations held around a campfire into the small hours of the night.

 

The dream that drives Mechinat Melach HaAretz is to lead students on a path that at its end the young men and women who walked it will be proud of themselves, will see themselves in a different light, and will know that they are capable of meeting any challenge or goal they set for themselves.

 

Mecinat Melach HaAretz is designed to promote self-development focused on responsibility built through clarification of self-identity. It will allow a shared format of action and of thought that will lead to a vision of involvement and action, and will demand from its students to search and to plumb the depths of their own personalities in all the circles of life: the personal, the group, the national and the Jewish.