Ilan Gur-Ze'ev
 

The Israeli space is an arena where the relevance, vitality, and productivity of conflicting philosophies of education are manifested in a unique clarity. This is one of the reasons why the Israeli educational arena (in its broader sense) can offer an important contribution to the general philosophical discourse. This volume is the first attempt to present these philosophical and political conflicts. Here they will be addressed within their unique multicaltural, national, race, gender, ethnic and class struglles. Part of this uniqueness is due to the fact that the Israeli context accommodates strong parallel pre-modern, modern and postmodern conditions. All these are framed within steaming rich cultural and political settings which contain, among other things something of the symbolic vividness of the great three monotheistic religions with their present-day reformers, fundamentalists as well as their various "spiritual", instrumental-oriented, post-instrumental, and other alternatives. These conditions and dynamics are reflected in the local conflicting philosophies of education. The philosophical work of critically reconstructing or representing these conflicting educational agendas might become part and parcel of a more general struggle over forgotten human potentials and responsibilities, over new possibilities for reflection, transcendence, resistance and transformation. In other words, it has a potential contribution or at list relevance to the refusal of abandoning the struggle over more human conditions in a context of globalizing capitalism, high-tech technologies, post-modern culture industry and widening inequality, hunger, and hopelessness. A critical reconstruction of conflicting philosophies of education in Israel is also potentially important since the Israeli condition manifests in a unique clarity the violence of normalizing education.(1)

Normalizing education is a manifestation of symbolic violence which, in its part is conditioned by succesdsful non-symbolic violence and suitable conditions. It is violent first and foremost in the sense that it is responsible to the production of subject and her subjectivity from the "exterior". It internalizes and controlls the "I" as a focal-point of certanty, a center for decisions, strives, fears and hopes, as well aas her Other and its reality. It does so by seting the conceptual possibilities, by producing and controlling the hegemonic language as well as the apparatuses of representation of "reality". It determines also the structure of her strives, her consciousness, and her identity. It affects and even determines the limits of the subject and her "practical" needs, possibilities and limitations in the private as well as in the public sphere. Even the possibilities of critique and resistance are already determined in a stable realm of self-evidence,(2)  served and reflected by the hegemonic normalizing education. Two rivals, however, challenge normalizing education. One competitor is of its own kind - a rival system, an alternative order, with its own normalizing education and its own quest for internal and external colonization and conquests. The other challenge is the infinity,(3)   the very openness of being.(4)  As a special manifestation of being every human being has a potential of realizing her potential as a subject - not being totally or eternally subjected to complete control, subjection, and manipulation. These are the sources of the unique human property of a potential quest and struggle for counter-education as a dialogical reflection and transcendence. As subjects women and men have an immanent possibility of being different than directed to become by the hegemonic normalizing education. This potential is a constant threat to the reproduction of the Same,(5)  to manifested violence of the continuum,(6)  or, in other words to the historical triumph of hegemonic normalizing education. In this volume all this will not be presented in a direct manner, yet one can hear its echoes in the various works that are gathered here focusing on philosophies of education in Israel. The present volume is explicitly devoted to the other challenge to normalizing education: the counter-violence of rival normalizing educational projects within a given context. These conflicts and rivalries have a special role in forming-while-challenging the social, cultural and political equilibrium of the present hegemonic system. The Israeli arena will serve here as a test case for this general philosophical-political life-and-death struggle.

The identity, interests, and the competence of subjects and collectives as objects of manipulations are determined also by other elements of normalizing education. To a great degree they are determined by the specific characteristic the counter-violence of its internal and external rivals and by the specific attributes of the death-and-life struggle over hegemony (7)  which is always present between and within them. As will be shown in the present critical reconstructions of the battles between conflicting Jewish and Palestinian, as well as between rival Jewish cultures, groups and educational-political agendas the creativity of the violence of normalizing education includes not only the formation of human subjects and collectives but also their immanent blindness to the practices and concepts which produced them and their horizons. As normalized human beings in their system they are prevented from being other than they are directed to be – as long as the system within which they are arrested is not sevirely cracked or deconstructed by alternative philosophical and political violences.(8)

Some of the articles consentrate on showing how the productivity of normalizing education is also determined by an effective vailing of its inner violence and accentuates the direct and indirect violence of the Other and the rival educational apparatuses. Only within this framework could the Zionist project succeed. Philosophy of education in the service of normalizing education has different degreies of effectivnes and creativity in different contexts. In this volum this will be presented in full detail in the articles which refer to different aspects of the Israeli educational context.

This special issue of Studies in Philosophy and Education concentrates on the intellectual impotence, moral devotion, cultural willingness and social and technological efforts for the preservation and enhancement of the tyranny of normalizing education over human being in a specific arena. The various studies in this volume, with all their differences of orientation and issues under consideration will reconstruct the ways for forcing subjects and communities to commit themselves to destroy the otherness - or the human potential - of the inner and external Other. They reveal this fenomenon as a characteristic of both the victimizers and their victims.(9)  Normaly philosophy of education supports this process, justifies or hides this reality.

As will be shown in this volume, however, at the same time philosophy of education might become also a non-productive, or even a rebellious element in the culture industry and present a serious challenge to the present order. It can address and challenge the perpetuated success of normalizing education, in all its versions, among all rival communities, narratives and armies of teachers, consumers, soldiers, and intellectuals. This, of course, does not guaranty that such a critique or resistance will not become another dogmatic or nihilistic blow to the free Spirit or nothing but another version of normalizing education. It always faces the danger of transforming quests for reflection, for resistance, and critical-dialogical alternatives into nothing more than a specific version of normalizing education. This is why it is of vital importance that the philosophical and ethical challenge of the concrete versions of normalizing education will try to galvanize a refusal to normalizing education as such, not only to a certain versions of it.

The Israeli context is unique in the sense that its conflicting normalizing educations incubates strong competing pre-modern, modern, and post-modern educational alternatives, each striving to conquer the center and impose its realm of self-evidence on its Others. More than once, in Israel, it is done in the name of multiculturalism, democratic rights, or by using the rhetoric of justice to the victimes. In Israel, with all its changes, this process goes on for more than a hundred years of Zionist education.The Zionist project could not succeed without overcoming diversity, destroying paticular Jewish histories, identities and interests and create a vivid myth of the "New Jew", the Israeli. This victory was fundamentaly an educational victory of a special realization of modern philosophy of education. As usual, it was interwined with but basically inabled by good teachers, loyal heroes, devoted farmers and efficient beurocrates and polititians. Yet it is impossible to separate these victories from its internal and external victims. The vitimes are first of individuals, communities, cultures, and rival interests, but all these are to be recollected only in the framework of "their" systems, "their" power relations and "their" normalizing education. The vitality of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis - as well as the successful production of "the Israeli" or "the Palestinian" in the last hundred years is of vital importance for any reflection on, or rearticulation of current critical philosophy of education. Among these collectives there are rich neglected groups, destroyed memories, controlled identities, exiled histories, and distorted consciousness by successful educational philosophies of education. Each of them strives to control, redeem, exile, reeducate, or destroy in an unmediated manner its internal and external Others and their philosophy and politics of education.

This volume will try to give voice not only to oppressed Palestinians, to silenced women, to mizrachi Jews, to forgotten humanist alternatives in Zionism or to the victims of the post-modern Israeli culture industry as consumers, producers, soldiers in a triumphent/oppressive army, and citizens of the cyberspace and high-tech society. It will not only reconstruct the conflicting educational religious, national, or anti-ideological alternatives and philosophies. This volume will try not only to present Israeli (and counter-Israeli) philosophical, political concepts and practices of education in a broad social, cultural and historical perspective. It will try to do all this but also more than that. It will also try to open a gate for addressing the need and the possibility of counter-education in Israel and in general.

I would like to share these interests with the readers of this edited volume already in the beginning of their journey. I did not hide my interests from the participants of this volume, while inviting these scholars of various and more than once conflicting philosophies of education. Some of the authors are committed radicals, some are declared liberals, and proud sophisticated conservatives. Nevertheless, it is my believe that the work as a whole not only offers an interesting reconstruction but also raises dangerous philosophical-political questions not only to the Israeli context, but to other arenas as well. I hope that such a contextualized work will also contribute to the possibilities for unavailing the most protected secrets of the Zionist education which enabled the creation, the expansion, the protection and the flourishing violence of rhe Israeli project. It is my hope that Conflicting Philosophies of Education in Israel is a small step towards this direction as p-art of a dialogue with other cultures and other philosophical orientations.
 

Notes

(1) Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, Jan Masschelein, and Nigel Blake, "Reflectivity, reflection, and counter-education", Studies in Philosophy and Education (forthcoming).

(2)Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press1978, p. 88.

(3) Emmanuel Levinas, "Philosophy and the idea of infinity", Collected Philosophical Papers, translated by Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht 1987, pp. 25-46.

(4) Emmanuel Levinas, "Is onthology fundamental?", in Adrian T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (eds.), Basic Philosophical Writings, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 5.

(5) Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 22.

(6) Horkheimer, or Benjamin

(7) Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, "The morality of acknowledging/not-acknowledging the Other's Holocaust/genocide", Journal of Moral Education, 27: 2 (1998), p. 161.

(8)  In this volume this issue is addressed by Adam Tenenbaum in his "responsibilities of a post-modern educator".

(9) In this volume this is the central concern of Denis Asad's paper on the Palestinian philosophy of eduation.