Internet Popular Culture and Jewish Values: The Influence of Tec ...

How do educators help children evaluate these Internet messages? Do the different educational streams in Israel, from secular to Modern-Orthodox, differ in their approach to teaching technology and working with the Internet? Can a theory such as Rokeach’s comprehensive theory of change, an extension of the consistency theory, help explain how this conflict can be resolved? What is the significance of learning how teachers and students evaluate these messages in relation to the values both teachers and students embody? Perhaps most important, on a broader global scale, can differences in other cultures be explained in the treatment of their cherished values and procedures for evaluating Internet popular-culture messages where both secular public schools and religious private or public schools coexist?

In order to conduct this research, a design was created to examine the manner in which Israeli computer coordinators manage the values taught to their students while evaluating conflicting values represented by Internet messages. Fortunately, we were able to adapt Rokeach’s theory and methodology—applied from his comprehensive theory of change for examining value change and stability—to the current study.

The present study consisted of survey research on Internet usage within an Israeli Jewish elementary education setting. Israel was chosen because “the Jewish state” was a natural site to explore the interaction between Jewish values and popular-culture messages from the Internet. We focused on Jerusalem because, as the capital of Israel, it is universally known as the cradle of the Jewish religion and would be a fertile location for studying Jewish values and the Internet. In addition, our previous connections with the computer administrators at the Jerusalem municipality’s Computer Center helped facilitate access to the current participants, the elementary-school computer coordinators. We agreed that a school setting comprising educators would be more feasible to survey than children and their parents in a home environment.