The Mandel School for Educational Leadership (MSEL) recently held a special event to mark the naming of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s school of education after Prof. Shlomo (Seymour) Fox.
Prof. Fox (1929-2006) was head of the Hebrew University’s school of education, founder of the university’s Melton Center for Jewish Education, president of the Mandel Foundation-Israel, and founder of the Mandel School for Educational Leadership. Fox served as advisor to four ministers of education and greatly influenced the formation of education policy in Israel, particularly regarding the importance of academia for education as a whole.
At the event, fellows read texts written by Fox, guided by Dr. Daniel Marom, head of Pedagogy and Tutoring Development at the Mandel School for Educational Leadership. The texts relate to Fox’s meetings with education policy makers and to the insights he gained from these meetings. Marom explained: “There was almost no move he made that didn’t involve a repeated cycle of guiding principles, implementation, evaluation of results, and then a reformulation of the guiding principles… Fox believed that real trust between policy-makers and professionals is the most important foundation of educational leadership, and that it is the task of the educational leader to build this trust.”
In addition, MSEL director Danny Bar Giora and MSEL faculty members Ruth Lehavi, Shimon Adler and Dr. Yehuda Ben-Dor all shared some of their personal recollections of Prof. Fox.
