Israeli Education: Changing Perspectives

CREATING A PAST TO MEET present needs and shape the future is a widespread phenomenon in the early phases of national awakening. This article will examine the influence of ideological identification on the writers of the history of education in Israel and appraise the extent of their own awareness of ideology's impact on their work. There is a difficulty, however, in determining which books actually deal with the history of education, for only recently has this field been treated according to academic standards.

During the period of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in pre-state Israel) and the first decades of statehood, most of the writing on the history of education was not based on genuine research. Three categories of education history may be distinguished. The first consists of personal memoirs describing the experiences of teachers and school principals. Despite its major drawback as a narrow, subjective perspective riddled with memory lapses, it retains great value as primary source material. ¹ The second category includes teachers' reports, which were often published in newspapers and journals. ² Although this material is more objective than individual memoirs, it too suffers from the defects of unsystematic writing that concentrates on current issues, but lacks authentic historical research and a time perspective. The third category contains books, sometimes with historical introductions, that describe Israeli education. Most of the authors gathered their data from secondary sources rather than conducting original historical research. Throughout the period of the Yishuv and during most of Israel's statehood, works in these three categories have provided the only literature in the history of education.

The Pre-Zionist Period

With the development of modern schools in the traditional, orthodox Jewish community in Palestine in the mid-nineteenth century, newspapers and journals began to report on, and advocate innovations in, education. ³ Jewish and Gentile travelers to the Holy Land published sketches of their visits to Jewish schools. ⁴ Books dealing with health and welfare issues also shed light on the early stages of education when schools were often annexed to hospitals and administered by medical directors. ⁵ Reports appeared, written by delegations of Jewish intellectuals [Maskilim] who were dispatched by philanthropic organizations to find ways to increase the Yishuv's economic productivity. ⁶ Books devoted solely to educational enterprises included works by Ludwig August Frankel, who described the problems facing the establishment of the Lemel School in Jerusalem, and Ephraim Cohen-Reiss, the representative of the German-Jewish sponsored Ezra Association [Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden]. ⁷

All these works illustrate the first two categories of historical writing; i.e., personal impressions. Although a variety of ideologies are reflected, the books' main theme combines the European romantic view of the exotic east and a patronizing gaze at the stagnant Jewish community in the backwater Middle East. Many of these early writers expressed the ideological commitment of the Diaspora intellectual to enlighten his brethren in Eretz Israel.

"Participant-Writers"--The Emerging Zionist Historiography

With the arrival of the First Aliyah [wave of immigration] in the 1880s and the establishment of Hebrew educational institutions, reports on school conditions became a common feature in newspapers and literature, and historical writing reflected a nationalist orientation. ⁸ Within the religiously orthodox "Old Yishuv" opposing modern and national Hebrew schools, literary muckraking developed that was not averse to employing personal vilification and social ostracism. ⁹ At the same time, Jewish philanthropic institutions, such as the Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Ezra Association, dedicated to advancing modern education under the direction of Jewish intellectuals, continued their activity. Three main blocs of competing ideologies can thus be discerned in the literature on the development of education in this period.

As Jewish nationalism gathered momentum, the history of education became the history of nationalist education, with hardly a glance given to the ultra-orthodox and philanthropic educational systems. Only nationalist players appear on the stage of history, the rest of the cast seems to have vanished and their voices muted, even though they made...