Education and Ideology
By
Lawrence Davidson
August
11, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Education is one of those words that has a
positive connotation for almost everyone –
usually generating a warm and fuzzy feeling that
suggests a richer and brighter future. But that
is just an idealization of the concept. As
I have stated before,
as far as the state is concerned, education has
two major purposes: to fulfill the vocational
needs of the economy and the political need for
ideologically loyal citizens. It is in the
pursuit of this last goal that education can
reveal a darker side.
Here
are a few stories concerning the interface
between education and political ideology. I take
them from the annals of Israeli/Zionist
education, but one can certainly find other
examples worldwide.
Story One:
David Sarna Galdi is an American Jew who
attended Jewish schools in New York City, went
to Jewish summer camps, attended synagogue
regularly, and vacationed often in Israel with
his parents. In his own words he had “a
quintessential Zionist Jewish-American
upbringing,” and as a result, “I never heard one
word about the [Israeli] occupation [of
Palestinian territory], or even the actual word,
‘occupation.’” Only after immigrating to Israel
did he “become aware of the occupation and all
its ramifications.”
The
Israeli occupation is 50 years old and ongoing.
Can Galdi’s story really be true? It certainly
can be true if you grow up within a closed
information environment – an environment where
elements of non-local reality are simply left
out of the educational process. That seems to be
the case when it comes to Zionist
Jewish-American education.
Story Two: Holocaust
Memorial Day in Israel, which this year was on
April 24, is a time for remembering the
Holocaust and learning its historical lessons.
Yet there are two ways of approaching those
lessons – one is universal and the other
particular.
Most of
Israel’s educational system has chosen to forgo
the universal message of the need to promote
human rights and stand up against oppression
wherever it is practiced. Instead the
particularistic message Israeli schoolchildren
have always received is that the Jews are
eternal victims. Indeed, “Israel and its strong
army are the only things preventing another
genocide by non-Jews.”
Emphasis
on Consensus
Very
few Israeli educators have dared break with this
official point of view. However, those few who
have describe a systematic “misuse of the
Holocaust [that is] pathological and intended to
generate fear and hatred” as an element of
“extreme nationalism.”
Again
the key to such a process of indoctrination
embedded within the educational system is the
maintenance of a closed information environment.
As one Israeli educator, who has grown uneasy
with the propagandistic nature of his nation’s
schooling, puts it, “increasingly they [the
students] receive no alternative messages in
school.”
Story Three: Finally, let us take a comparative
look at two reports on Israel’s educational
system. One is a 2009 Palestinian report (PR)
entitled
“Palestinian History and Identity in Israeli
Schools.” The
other is a 2012 report (IS) produced by the
Institute for Israeli Studies at the University
of Maryland and is entitled,
“Education in Israel: The Challenges Ahead.” What
strikes the reader of these reports is how much
they agree on the nature of specific
problems having to do with the education of
minority groups in Israel.
Here
are a few of the problems both reports
highlight:
(1)
Both the IS and the PR reports agree that the
Israeli educational system is at once a
segregated and highly centralized affair
controlled by the Israeli government’s Ministry
of Education. As a consequence, according to the
IS report, “Arab schools are significantly
underfunded compared to Jewish schools,” and
this is reflected in an unfavorable
“differential student-teacher ratios in Arab
schools” (IS report, p. 12). The PR adds the
following information: “Public education for
Palestinians [one quarter of all students in
Israel] is administered by the Department for
Arab Education, which is a special
administrative entity within the Ministry of
Education and under its direct control. The
Department for Arab Education has no autonomous
decision making authority” (PR, p. 1).
(2) As
described in the IS report, because curriculum
in Arab-Israeli schools is controlled by the
Ministry of Education, sensitive subjects such
as Palestinian history are censored (not allowed
to be “openly discussed”). The PR elaborates:
Israeli textbooks are highly selective in their
“choice of facts and explanations, ignoring
contradictory arguments, especially facts
connected to Arab-Palestinian history.”
Ultimately, “they erase modern Palestinian
history” (PR, p. 1). Arab-Israeli students are
forced, at least superficially, to absorb a
Zionist interpretation of history because
without being able to repeat it on their
graduation exam they cannot successfully finish
high school. Palestinian students do, of course,
know their own version of history, which they
get from numerous non-school sources.
However, the Israeli Jewish students also are
deprived. They are systematically kept away from
this same Palestinian narrative – one ardently
believed in by over 20 percent of their nation’s
population. Under these circumstances, as the IS
report points out, “national cohesion” is hard
to build.
The IS
report recommends “strengthening within the
schools the democratic and pluralistic view
embodied in Israel’s Declaration of
Independence, focusing on building shared values
and acceptance of diversity. To strengthen
communal understanding and build a stronger
common identity” (IS, p. 21).
Unfortunately, these recommendations are
impossible to implement, and I suspect that the
authors know that this is so. In the case of
Israel, education has been subordinated to
ideology to such an extent that it cannot
promote diversity, shared values and a common
identity with non-Jews. Thus, given the Zionist
ethic as practiced by Israelis and their
diaspora supporters, the Palestinian identity
and values are anathema and represent threats.
Thus, IS recommendations become the equivalent
of taking poison.
No
Advertising
- No
Government
Grants
-
This
Is
Independent
Media
|
Ideology
Bests the Ideal
Any
ideology represents a closed information
environment. By definition it narrows reality
down to a limited number of perspectives.
Ideology also invites hubris, rationalized by
nationality or religion and their accompanying
peculiar take on history. It becomes the goal of
an ideologically managed educational system to
promote political loyalty and the hubris it
seems to justify. The current terminology for
this condition is “exceptionalism.”
All of
this is a far cry from the way education is
idealized:
According to Aristotle,
“it is the mark of an educated mind to be able
to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
Thanks to the Zionist educational system both in
Israel and the diaspora, there are many
otherwise educated Jews who cannot even
entertain the thought of shared values and
common identity with Palestinians.
According to Malcolm X,
“Education is the passport to the future, for
tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it
today.” However, those being educated are
usually passive and someone else has prepared
what they will learn, and therefore has prepared
their future.
According to Martin Luther King,
Jr.,
“The function of education is to teach one to
think intensively and to think critically.” In
an ideal situation that may be true, but in
practice it runs against the historical
political mission of post-industrial educational
systems.
Finally, one might consider
this observation
by Albert Einstein: “Education is what remains
after one has forgotten what one has learned in
school.” This is a welcome insight, yet the
problem is that relatively few people forget the
political and cultural imperatives of their
education. Those who do, including Einstein
himself, are often considered by their fellows
as “social mistakes.”
Now we
know why it is so hard for Israelis to embrace
the imperatives of peace, or for the rest of us
to go beyond our present era of nation-states be
they democratic or otherwise. Our
self-destructive stubbornness is a function of a
successful, ideologically managed education.
Lawrence Davidson is a retired professor of
history from West Chester University in West
Chester PA. His academic research focused on the
history of American foreign relations with the
Middle East. He taught courses in Middle East
history, the history of science and modern
European intellectual history.
http://www.tothepointanalyses.com/
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.