In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The History of Kibbutz Education: Practice into Theory
  • Eliezer Ben-Rafael
The History of Kibbutz Education: Practice into Theory, by Yuval Dror. Bern: Peter Lang, 2001. 349 pp. $52.95.

This is a long-awaited book. Kibbutz education has always been one of the most daring aspects of this exceptional social structure which the kibbutz has illustrated with vigor, until recently. Though, while this type of community has been well publicized by a long series of works—articles and books—for its community life, political participation, or economic development, its educational singularity has been much more rarely the object of the same kind of interest—and unjustly so.

It is rightly emphasized by the author that, like all aspects of this particular type of structure, kibbutz education took off before it was sustained and legitimized by a profound theoretical elaboration. The principle of collective education was established gradually as a corollary of the organization of the collective settlement. This pragmatic process explains that it adapted—quite easily—to the different socio-historical situa tions that the kibbutz and the kibbutz movement encountered over the years. The continuation of the process was, however, to lead—through crises and transformations of the kibbutz itself—to the erosion of the singularity of kibbutz education, up to the point that the twenty-first century witnesses a kind of comeback to the point of departure, when kibbutz education just started to develop that singularity. The principal weakness of this book, in this critique’s outlook, is that this more recent sequence is not developed sufficiently, and leaves the reader unfamiliar with kibbutz reality, to the point where s/he might think that “history continues,” while it is quite clear to no few observers of the kibbutz today that this particular story seems to have come to its concluding sequence.

Even with this reservation in mind and even if the “last act” is not sufficiently expanded, this book’s unique contribution resides in the fact that it tells of an exceptional educational experiment that has lasted for more than three generations —which, in itself, constitutes an outstanding achievement.

Hence, this book tells us about everything that has made kibbutz education unique. It presents the major principles that guided it at the epoch of its peak and which were implemented here probably more than in any other educational structure—an education where children constitute a recognized social group of their own directly taken in charge by the public; an education where studies, social experience, informal learning, and [End Page 126] shouldering responsibility are one complex but coherent process; an education where school examinations do not exist and educators have to invest their best to motivate a sanctionless learning process. This book also expands on the structural pecularities of this kind of education. It describes the children’s “house” which for years was the center of their life and from which they went for daily (or weekly, in the more rigorous Kibbutz Artzi movement) visits to their parents’ “room”; it describes the youth move ment which organized the same children in informal educational frameworks; it draws out the role of the “metapelet,” that is the children nurse, in charge of the children house, who was a pillar of this educational system; it illuminates the importance of the children’s farm, which was their direct responsibility and where they used to work every day, after studies.

Dror then shows the revolution that shook this educational setting and which consisted of the change of sleeping arrangements in the 1970s and early 1980s, when, under the pressure of parents—the family had since the 1960s been widely recognized as the principal actor of the kibbutz community—, children’s night was moved from the children’s house to their parents’, where additional rooms were now built in order to make the change feasible and comfortable. From then on, the status of the metapelet’s role was shattered and reduced to a caretaker. At the same epoch, an ever-growing cohort of Israeli youngsters were attending institutions of higher learning, and kibbutz niks were less and less ready to ignore the social importance of higher education for their own sons and...

Share