Chinuch—the education of children חינוך

It begins with the father. 'And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children' (Deuteronomy 6:7)—the duty is personal, and a child's first teacher is his father.

But already at the end of the Second Temple period it was clear that this did not work for everyone: one child has no father, another's father is unlearned. The Gemara (Bava Batra 21a) has kept the name of the man who changed it: 'truly, that man is to be remembered for good, and Joshua ben Gamla is his name, for but for him Torah would have been forgotten in Israel'—he ordained that teachers be appointed in every district and every town and that children of six or seven be brought to them. So teaching became the community's business.

That arrangement held for nearly two thousand years: the cheder, the talmud torah for those who could not pay, the yeshiva for the grown. It broke twice, both times under outside pressure: when the state introduced compulsory schooling, and when the girls went into it—girls who were not taught Torah. The answer to the first was Jewish schools with general subjects; the answer to the second was Bais Yaakov.