Jewish day schools and identity

In a recent Jewish Ideas Daily article, entitled “Identity = ?”, Yehuda Mirsky reviews a recent issue of Sh’ma magazine devoted to the question of the nature of Jewish identity today.
Not long ago, being Jewish was something inherent, innate, already there, something that could simmer throughout one’s life or be fanned into a flame in times of celebration, crisis, or self-searching.  Nowadays, Jewishness is, for most younger Americans (and many older ones), a decision, a choice, and, moreover, an identity whose contents one can in essence construct regardless of what’s found in the tradition.
This got me thinking: what does all this mean for day school education?  For day school curricula?  Can a day school sketch the profile of its “ideal graduate” or are we all, individually, works in progress?  And how does all this work in deliberate, pluralistic settings?
Maybe that’s one of the reasons day schools are in the current economic pickle – when Jewish identity was a given, handed to us from parents and grandparents, the school’s mission and curriculum were more or less self-evident.  In a word, it was MUCH EASIER to start and run a school where everyone is of like mind, and you could begin to get an economy of scale.  But in this new era of self-constructed, fluid Jewish identity, it’s hard to rally large numbers of people to one particular vision.  To the contrary, as soon as you (feel you) have “enough” people, the temptation to split off from another school and start one’s own is overwhelming.
One could imagine highlighting the “peoplehood” dimension of Jewishness that offers a basis for cooperation and reaching across religious boundaries, or establishing benchmarks for “Jewish literacy” so that Jewish youth are not only free but also well-equipped, in their early adulthood, to craft their personal Jewish identity out of the rich resources of the Jewish tradition.
However, in the current cultural climate of self-constructed Judaism, for mission-driven schools I think the trend to “make shabbos for yourself” is inevitable.  The recent economic crisis might force a couple of disparate Jewish groups to make shabbos together – at least until things improve.  But the division and splitting will continue as long as Jewish identity grows almost entirely from the ground up.
Michael Berger