Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, University of Haifa
Literacy and the emergence of the Zionist hegemony
Historically, the founding assumptions and goals of Israeli education were formed as bona fide manifestations of modernism. They reflected the urgent need of socialists and liberals within the framework of Zionism for new bodies of knowledge that would serve the national project has formed knowledge images and meta-narratives that met these interests. As part of this project and as a precondition to its success Zionist education manifested modern commitments for emancipation basically in its nation-building version. However social utopia, in its socialist, anarchist and liberal versions and even individualistic trends formed part and parcel of this emancipatory trend. This project demanded a new educational philosophy and new politics committed to the constitution at all costs (Bar-Gal 1993: 55-57) of the New Jew, her collective aims in the Jewish society and universally (Leon 1916: 1). Zionist education can be seen as a manifestation of the efficiency of the violence of colonizing education that was for a century targeted against internal (Jewish) communities, their memory (Ram 1995) and interests as well as against external rivals, their identity, memories, narratives and social, political and economical fortunes. The supposed conquest of the Jewish free instincts, consciousness and possibilities of national sovereignty by the formative powers of the Diaspora demanded strict purification of the collective soul (Almog 1997: 127-128). Ever since the formative figure of Zionist education organized the educational possibilities so that the curriculum, the pedagogy that was preferred, and the didactic were all consciously produced in accordance with the specific needs and as a manifestation of Zionist Zwekrationalitaet and its commitment for enclosure of the Other.
One of the greatest figures in this field, Ben-Zion Dinur, testifies quite explicitly on this point (Dinur 1958: 11-12). This trend of instrumentalization was also manifested in the planning of the Hebrew language hegemony (Shor 1997: 169) as part of the nation-building project and the conquest of Eretz Israel. The universalist and the nationalist, the emancipatory elements and the repressive dimensions all, conducted a merciless battle along the lines of Zionist and anti-Zionist alternatives until the Holocaust. Their rivalries were also present between different Zionist trends and within each of them. Historically, the ethnocentrist, or the nationalist trend which emphasized the nation-building and the conquering of Israel’s soil and the Jewish soul had the upper hand over other trends which stressed much more strongly other dimensions such as universal emancipation and improvements in Israeli society (Sterenhell 1995). This general historical development of Israeli education is present also in its attitude to language.
Both socialist and liberal trends in the Zionist
education understood the study of the Hebrew language within the framework
of a philosophical attitude which emphasized total commitment to Zionist
ideals and goals and to the Jewish ethnocentrism as constitutive elements
in relation to language. Here a special version of instrumentalism is present,
as opposed to the kind of instrumentalism enhanced today by the Israeli
Culture Industry within the framework of Instrumental Rationality. The
teleological framework of the Zionist project was actually a secularized
political theology (Raz-Krakotzkin 1997). It was an endeavor more within
the framework of “reading the word, reading the world” (Freire 1987), self-constitution
and rebirth. It was, however, “reading” and “writing” a world
which was yet to be created within a teleological conception, where the
text, or the aim of personal and collective meaning were predetermined
“by the imperative of Jewish history” and effectively manipulated by Zionist
curriculum and Hebrew teachers. Zionism was conceived as containing an
essence to be realized in history which is ultimately to be realized in
the State of Israel and its “mission”, “a spiritual-moral will”, as formulated
by Israel’s first premier, David Ben-Gurion (Ben-Gurion 1975: 1).
The eighth Zionist congress that was held
at The Hague in August 1907 was the first congress to deal with cultural
and educational issues as central themes. Shmaryahu Levin and Nachum
Sokolov tried to convince their colleagues that the future of the Zionist
project depended on education in general and in particularly, on making
the Hebrew language the language of the New Jew (Levin 1996: 182).
The eighth congress accepted a resolution according to which the Hebrew
language was the official language of the Zionist movement (Ibid. 183).
But the victory of the Hebrew language was not realized by an official
resolution. As other dimensions of Zionist education and normalizing education
in general, its realization depended on a fearful struggle between various
powers, interests, identities and ideologies. Normally, those Zionists
who were the most determined to constitute the Zionist state and create
the New Jew were those who were totally devoted to the ideal of the simultaneous
Hebrew language and the Jewish national revival. The similar rhetoric used
for describing the conquering of the land and the ethnic cleansing of the
labor market revealed to what a degree the struggle between competing sets
of symbols is inseparable from concrete, economic, social and military
battles (McLaren 1997: 296). The struggle between different Jewish narratives
and ideals in Palestine/Israel was called “the war of the languages”. Explicitly
the struggle was over the language of teaching at schools, but implicitly
it was a struggle between competing cultural and political orientations,
organizations and groups, a battle between different Jewish narratives
and towards different Jewish futures. The organization of the teachers’
union and students’ association with financial support from abroad supported
and supported the victory of the Hebrew language which was a landmark in
the constitution of an Israeli identity. It is not a coincidence that in
this battle the students organized themselves in the early 1920s as “the
battalion of the language defenders in Israel” (Shor 1997: 171).
Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940), the founder of the Israeli political right understood the collective creative powers and not merely the potential of what today is called “literacy”. He emphasized the suggestive potential of literacy and concluded that
...We have to bind our children to the Hebrew nation, to teach, to
“poison” all their soul. In national education the language is the
important thing and the content is a mere shell...(Jabotinsky 1972: 362).
On another occasion he declared that the Hebrew teacher and the Hebrew child are the true heroes of the Jewish people. Jabotinsky’s literacy connected the struggles over the land with the struggles over the collective identity and with the language. The purification of the Jews from their Diaspora mentality is connected to the collective regeneration by the Hebrew language. Language, manipulated efficiently by teachers/educators (as agents of “history’s imperative”) is described as a battle field between identities, possibilities and narratives and is to decide the future of the military aspects of Israeli-Palestinian wars:
You are responsible not only for the existence of the language, but
also for the very existence of the Hebrew race. The Diaspora has
weakened our body, it has deeply undermined our vitality... Every
young Hebrew, a boy or a girl is a soldier of the nation, a soldier ready
to be called for duty. The language of our past and future is in his mouth
and his arms are strong for war and will know no fear. Make yourself
ready for these two missions. Take into your heart the language and
all its treasures. You should teach heroism your muscled. The bravery
games of today might become the breviary of the war of the future
(Jabotinsky 1993: 163, my translation).
The Zionist left in Israel was also divided over the role of the Hebrew language among other languages, yet the supporters of Hebrew had the upper hand here too. This was the case because leaders such as Berl Katzenelson understood the halutz (the pioneer as the New Jew) as a farmer-warrior in the old-new land as connected to the language of the bible containing the Israeli telos.
On the top of our spiritual work we are confronted with the challenge of
the distribution of the Hebrew language... Can we really accept that
cultural life will be fragmented, that Hebrew will be the language of the
culture and the worker will be detached from it, without a connection with
the treasures of past and present knowledge? Can we allow that here too
the misfortune of the Diaspora - language fragmentation - will take root?
...
(Katznelson 1961: 450, my translation).
In the first days of Israel’s independence in one of the first circulars issued by the Director-General of the Ministry of Education the ideological framework of the Israeli curriculum was officially declared:
The teacher’s duty is to emphasize to his pupils the epochs, deeds and
figures in which the national will for life was exemplified in the strongest
way... total devotion and bravery, martyrdom and the love of Israel, the
commitment to Zion and faith in redemption...[He has to] sow in their
hearts feelings of admiration for the great Jewish figures, its saints
and
its heroes (Ministry of Education 1957: 21, my translation).
This attitude was enforced on the secular part of society, Jews and
Palestinians alike including Druze, Bedouin and other ethnic, national,
religious and cultural minorities who were forced to enter schooling where
only the official narrative was tolerated. It was realized by allowing
and encouraging at schools – and within outdoors educational agencies such
as youth movements – textbooks, literacy and art which will tell only one
story: the story of a nation without land returning a land without its
people. Within the framework of this ”from exile – to redemption” narrative,
all textbooks and educational programs where articulated in the official
and hidden curriculum alike, aiming at contributing to the production of
the new Jew: from lessons at schools to visiting memorial sites, inventing
“national” dances, developing archeological sites and myths as manifestations
of the essential Jewishness of the land and its history to its educational/political
implications, and many other methods. The world in general and The Land
of Israel in particular was presented as a text that has to be de-coded
and re-articulated within the framework of the Zionist teaching. Naming
and renaming Palestinian named villages, rivers or animals and rewriting
their history was of outmost importance, along with renaming the Jewish
immigrants, giving them Hebrew names, teaching them the Hebrew language
and (re)inventing their moral-political imperatives. The Zionist curriculum
until 1967 is not to be considered only as a reflection of a gigantic effort
of normalizing education and its violence. It should be seen also as an
educational effort which enabled the necessary violence to conquer the
land, protecting it and developing it within a context of bloody national
and cultural conflict with the Palestinians on the one hand and with the
non-Zionist Jewish Diaspora and its diverse and reach histories, identities
and interests, on the other
.
After one hundred years of Zionist education
it is possible to conclude: ultimately the Zionist education did not have
the power to create any genuine cultural creations which are vital and
have durable existence, beside Israeli militarism (Ben-Eliezer 1995) and
literature. Even the splendid socio-cultural entity, the kibbutz, turned
out to be impotent (Rosner 1993: 46) and the myths which enabled the realization
of the Zionist dream have dissolved over the past two generations. One
of the instruments of the hegemonic Zionist ideology’s reproduction apparatuses
is the settlement museums who control the collective memory and distribute
the Zionist ethos, its language, images and lessons. Tamar Katriel concludes
her study on the settlement museums today and says about these museums
and vitality of their Zionist lessons what we think holds for the Zionist
ideology in general:
As culturally sanctioned sites for telling and retelling the pioneering
story, settlement museums are under ideological pressure to stabilize,
once-hegemonic version of a particular past that is now under siege.
What is at stake here is not just a matter of nostalgia. The discourse
of settlement and its ramifications go to the very heart of Israel’s most
divisive political debates over control of the land and attachment to place
(Katriel 1997: 159, my translation).
In the political, educational and military establishments where the constitutive myths of Zionism are still reproduced, the traditional secular (modernist) Zionists have to face ever-growing cynicism and ridicule. As part of this trend there are sporadic commitments for new secular apologetics and reformulations of Zionism by humanist intellectuals. Here it is important to mention Asa Kasher (Kasher 1998), David Ohana (Ohana 1997) and Gadi Taub (Taub 1998) as well as Nimrod Aloni who tries to realize this attitude in an alternative secular, humanistic-oriented alternative educational network (Aloni 1997). Yet with all their importance, at least for the time being these developments are but marginal counter-reactions of intellectuals faced with an ever-growing cultural and social distance from the community they would like to rescue. Secular right wing thinkers as Joseph Ben-Shlomo agree that the Zionist Spirit has actually passed away (Ben-Shlomo 1998). The instrumentalization of knowledge and the capitalist advance are not balanced by humanist educational alternatives but, rather, are being jointly attacked by postmodern and fundamentalist cultural alternatives. This trend was enhanced after the Israeli victory in the 1967 war, the big American investments and the efficient national, economic and cultural oppression of an additional million Palestinians in the new territories.
Since 1967 a strong pragmatist-functionalist tendency has been developed, a tendency characterized by anti-idealist, anti-solidarian, technocratic-oriented and assumed neutral towards the political context. Within its context even the recently- arrived constructivist attitudes have found themselves a comfortable accommodation. In the 1980s and 1990s a unique historical junction has been constituted between the modern national-instrumentalist attitude, with both its socialist and liberal wings, and the anti-idealism of instrumentalist functionalism. This unification blooms within the ideological framework of a post-Zionist economic liberalism which, to some degree, attracts even the religious nationalists of the country, whose final aim is nothing less than a full-scale Jewish theocracy in Greater Israel.
After the victory of the 1967 war knowledge rapidly became instrumentalized and national myths colonized by the rapidly growing Culture Industry. National symbols and myths were kept alive and even emphasized; yet they were fetishized and consumed as a commodity within an cultural framework where the logic of capitalism is the sole ruler. After the unsuccessful war of 1973, Israelihood itself was questioned, after the fragmentation and dissolving of myths such as the Sabra and the halutz (Almog 1997: 170) as were other ideals and myths that had been successfully produced by the national curriculum under the hegemony of the Labor party for more than two generations. By the mid 1980s Israelihood had began dissolving as a concept and as a social and cultural reality and Israel’s multiculturalism that was challenged by the melting-pot ideology became visible and was a central element in the cultural critique. This trend not only affected knowledge about the collective and the private identity, it challenged knowledge in many other spheres of life.
Within the new context knowledge was no longer evaluated in categories such as those common in the tradition of Objective Reason: promoting fulfillment of the cosmic telos or betraying it, patriotic/unpatriotic, true/false, beautiful/ugly, and so forth, have been replaced by performative and functionalist yardsticks such as: efficient/inefficient, high rating/low rating, fashionable/unfashioned. The difference lies in the abandonment of the absolute, transcendental and all-encompassing rational-moral categories. The shift from absolute categories to non-foundationalist, local, temporary and contingent ones is paralleled by another shift: one from the imperative of self-sacrifice for the collective as a manifestation of an idealist and utopian commitment to a different commitment - to the subjectivity of the individual as a free, socially neutral, sophisticated consumer.
The old rhetoric and the hegemonic Zionist ideology which to a certain degree is still addressed by the political establishment, the army and the State Educational Network tries to challenge the new conditions and integrate its less harmful components into the existing system. The declaration of the Director-General of the Ministry of Education from 1989 is a manifestation of this conservative attitude towards literacy: its official aim is
To pass on the knowledge about the aims of the revival of the
Hebrew language and its place in the Zionist project and to give
the people the feeling of taking part in the continuing development
of our language... to present the importance of our language in the
cultivation of our national and cultural identity...to cultivate educated
citizens who have a special sensitivity for the Hebrew language... in
its being the national language of the Jews... (Ministry of Education,
June 20 1989: 3-25, my translation).
Committed to the aim of preserving the relevancy of this foundationalist conservatism, even an institution such as the State Educational Network acknowledged that it had to adjust itself to the pragmatist rhetoric of the day. It did so, first and foremost, in order to conserve the Zionist constitutive myths and to resist the changing social context and its pressures for the reorganization of the modern schooling model, and the growing need to create a completely new, more appealing face to this leviathan. As part of the new power network, it used the traditional myths, symbols and narratives in the service of the new truth regions, such as desires, fears and hopes, that very little remains in common between them and the ideal of the New Jew as produced by traditional Zionist education.
In today’s post-Zionist Israel the hegemony of instrumental-oriented tendencies are so strong that even the religious-nationalist party, Mafdall, which politically is committed to ultra-nationalist positions accepted the new literacy into its sectarian educational system. If our thesis has some ground, then one should not wonder that, in the official publication of the Director-General of the Ministry of Education, Zevulun Orlev, a nominee of the Mafdall, literacy has been integrated with “education for excellence.” It is a manifestation of the measures taken for defending the ethnocentric Zionist narrative. We read: “School has an important role in exposing the child to the written culture with all its richness... and in constituting a positive attitude towards this culture.” (Ministry of Education December 20 1991: 20). To a reader not familiar with Israeli ethnocentrism we should note that in such a context, when an official refers to the “richness of culture”, she refers to the Jewish culture, as represented by the hegemonic ideology, and when a representative of the religious-nationalist party refers to “culture” he (it would probably be a male) would refer to the interpretation approved by undemocratic decisions of the party’s spiritual leadership of the Rabbis whose opinion is accepted as da’at Torah, namely as a religious verdict of the Torah which a Jew has to obey unconditionally. As common in academic research that is supplied to the official educational discourse and practice, in the rhetoric of the Director-General of the Ministry of Education too, literacy is conceived as a neutral tool aimed at strengthening the reading and writing skills of students (Ministry of Education December 1991: 21). Ultimately this power is used in the service of a fruitful meeting between the canonical texts and the conclusions that will ensure the destruction of the student’s uniqueness as an individual, her will and potential for free and critical/creative thinking (Giroux 1993: 74). The birthmarks of the functionalist-orientation literacy are exemplified in the same document by specific instructions directed to the teachers (in issues such as strategies into the listening to the radio, watching TV, and so forth) (Ministry of Education, ibid.).
One condition for the successful reception of literacy in the Israeli secular society of the 1990s is the apparently temporary conjunction of opposing forces. On one axis we see the triumph of the ultra religious-nationalist and the fundamentalist’s force, gaining more and more influence, confidence and agents. On the other, amid post-modern conditions, we see the representatives of secular Israel, economically affluent but spiritually and politically exhausted, looking for an alternative solidarity and public sphere that will overcome the loss of the traditional, mainly imagined, solidarity that was inevitable, as a side-effect of local capitalistic success. The economic liberalism of Steff Wertheimer is one of the most relevant educational alternatives which reflects this trend.
He combines the educational meaning of the constitutive myth of traditional Zionism, Tel Hai, with a new community, Teffen, myth and its industrial park (Wertheimer 1992: 34). These are central themes in his alternative Zionist ideology which also includes a critical evaluation of knowledge, within a theoretical framework that might recall the positivistic eschatology of Saint Simon.
His Utopianism reflects the erosion of the relevance of traditional Israeli myths; namely, the degeneration of Zionism as an relevant ideology (Ram 1995: 205), and the constitution of an economic, social and cultural reality in which Instrumental Rationality has the upper hand.
As an awesome idealist (Wertheimer 1992: 30) and now one of the richest people in Israel, Wertheimer erected a new capital for Israel. He founded the new capital in an uninhabited place in Galilee, at a place called Teffen and from there he delivers his redemptive national curriculum, calling for a secular revolution of values in accordance of the commands of capitalistic advance and as a secular Zionist alternative to the post-Zionist tendencies (Ibid.). This is a sophisticated educational program using theoretical and practical experiences. It attracts army officers and other highly motivated future capitalists who are willing to start from the button of the industrial production and theorizing process. This trend parallels the official educational programs of the national organization of Israeli industry. The organization invests up to 1% of its budget for developing and realizing a nation wide education which is introduced to schools via special workshops for pupils who come by their thousands to special educational centers. There is also a nation wide curriculum, sponsored by the Israeli industry which is implemented at schools in special lessons or, sometimes by reorganizing the whole educational process and its curriculum. Special emphasis is given here to literacy via computerized “research” and experience of the capitalist process in all its stages and dimensions – from the production to the distribution and rational management of future investments – textbooks and individual “experiences” of the market by the student as an independent- critical- innovative entrepreneur. Considerable theoretical and pedagogical efforts are invested in these programs (Veis, Gaon, Apelbaum 1996, Massing 1996). It is worthy to mention that these programs are praised by students, parents, teachers and bureaucrats and are very popular in Israel. Capitalist normalization in and for the market replaces the traditional Zionist patriotic normalization.
The educational impotency of the secular Israeli educational system and the infiltration of the new myths and concepts of knowledge lead the educational bureaucracy - that partly operates according to the new instrumentalist parameters - to look for saviors of all kinds and in all fields of education. This is reflected in the system’s disarray: from the introduction to schools of military and industrial managing systems to the integration of media literacy within the official curriculum. There is a growing awareness of the anomaly and split between the official rhetoric and the pedagogical commitments of schools and the real possibilities in the changed reality (Aviram 1996: 104). The pragmatic trend and the instrumentalist images of knowledge celebrate their victory within the secular state’s educational system. The instrumentalization of knowledge and the functionalist orientations flourish and postmodern critique blooms as a side-effect along with these developments as both a critique and an ornamental.
The way in which academic literacy research has been accepted by the political establishment and the Culture Industry should itself put a question mark on current literacy studies. The critique of the theory underlying the present hegemonic Israeli literacy reveals its supposed critical dimension as an agency for the process of modern society’s entering the newly-formed post-modern conditions in Israel.
As in other places where Instrumental Rationality and capitalist globalization have the upper hand, the distribution of literacy in general as a relevant product pays tribute to excellence, professionalism and social success (Rush, Moe, Storlie 1988: 11). It supports conformist consciousness, a consciousness that is always right and relevant from the hegemonic discourse point of view.
The problem with which the new discipline is dealing is not represented by its experts as existential, moral, philosophical and political but, rather, as practical: as a field of research that might be supported by a functionalist theory and neutral praxis, with no attention to the history of the interpretative tradition the new literacy joins, or the tradition it wants to overcome. Accordingly, the producers and distributors enhance their commodity’s character by empowering skills and practices for constituting, revealing or destroying symbols and meanings in accordance with the imperatives of capitalism and the current Culture Industry. They disregard questions such as: how do narratives and literary practices produce conceptual apparatuses, identities, knowledge and consciousness? How do certain literacies serve and realize the marginalizations and enclosures of the Others’ narrative power to present and create their own knowledge, memories, and interests? What are the ethical, epistemological and ontological preconditions and relations between a text, its author and its addressee as a dialogical issue? How can an emancipatory theory of literacy be developed as part of a corresponding transformative pedagogy? How can an the new literacy take part in an counter-education which will enable those who have been normalized, marginalized or silenced by the schools, mass media, and the cultural industry reclaim the authorship of their own lives? Henry Giroux’s words are worth quoting on this issue:
An emancipatory theory of literacy points to the need to develop
an alternative discourse and critical reading of how ideology, culture,
and power work within late-capitalist societies to limit, disorganize,
and marginalize the more critical and radical everyday experiences
and commonsense perceptions of individuals. At issue here is the
recognition that the political and moral gains that teachers and others
have made should be held onto and fought for with a new intellectual
and political rigor (Giroux 1988a: 63).
In our mind these are not the common characteristics of the current literacy produced in Israeli academy. Beyond the professional functionalist jargon of Israeli literacy, beyond the good will and creativity of the well-intentioned experts who are today developing, brightly, the new literacy blooms an unconscious cooperation with the present Culture Industry, and new tools for its advancement are developed. Within this framework literacy is developed to enhance the sophistication and productivity of the agents/victims of the system by empowering their skills for successful personal performance in the market of which current literacy is a part. The need for better literacy performance - as an alternative to a more radical and emancipatory literacy - is due to the already achieved and the future efficiency of the inner-colonization strategies in the system that has grown to such a degree that illiteracy has become a threat to the present economic (Freire 1987: xi) and mental order. From within the system it is impossible to refuse such a demand for new strategies for the self-reproduction of the current realm of self-evidence that for that matter uses traditions, social forces and technological progress that block or destroy the dialogical potential of human beings.
Consciously or unconsciously, the production of the new field fits perfectly and strengthens the privatization of ideologies and the reification of knowledge as represented by the visions of Israeli figures such as Steff Wertheimer in industry, Ehud Barak in the army (Gur-Ze’ev 1997) and Benjamin Netanyahu in the entire society. The technocratic rhetoric of advanced technology and successful industry as well as the bureaucratic, academic and current relevant political rhetoric participate in the same trend, albeit from different interests, jargons and perspectives. They all share the discourse that is relevant, up-to-date and effective; one which reflects an important dimension of current global economy in which it is impossible to separate rationally repression from the production, distribution and consumption of symbolic and material commodities. Our affective investment in consumer fetishes is rationally judged by the market and its indisputable “objective” demands where good or bad, true or false become irrelevant in face of the relevant criteria of the market like effectiveness, profit, and rating. Consequently, writes Zigmunt Bauman,
business interests cannot easily be squared with the sense of
responsibility for the welfare and well-being of those who may find
themselves affected by the business pursuit of greatest effects. In
business language, “rationalization” means more often than not laying
off people who used to derive their livelihood from serving the business
task before. They are now “redundant”, because a more effective way to
use the assets has been found - and their past services do not count for
much: each business transaction, to be truly rational, mast start from
scratch, forgetting past merits and debts of gratitude. Business
rationality
shrinks responsibility for its own consequences, and this is another mortal
blow to the influence of moral considerations (Bauman 1995: 264).
This trend is not challenged but, rather, is strengthened, even when the Israeli academic orientations towards literacy is produced under labels and explicit goals such as “advancing critique” and “multi-dimensional thinking” - within a functionalist orientation and as part of the present order of things and its strengthening by its agent’s success within its hegemonic power relations. I will try to show it by relating to Rachel Herz-Lazarowvits’s project.
Hertz-Lazarowvits’s conception of literacy is derived from her general understanding of communal learning, which is realized within the framework of her highly respected project called Elash. This, perhaps the most advanced project in the Israeli context, tries to see literacy in its socio-cultural contexts, while positioning in the center the students, their active involvement, the improvement of their self-esteem and their social integration (Hertz-Lazarowvits: 1993: 6). However, with all its importance, in our mind, this system, does not transcend and overcome the obstacle that Hertz-Lazarowvits is committed to overcome.
The literacy that is introduced within this system is supposed to be founded on the speech community as the source of knowledge, and the constitution and support for the literacy process (Ibid. 9). In that, it reflects the influence of American democratic and radical pedagogies (Giroux 1988: 158) as different from the hegemonic conceptions of literacy worldwide and in Israel. In opposition to these trends, Hertz-Lazarowvits is very sensitive to cultural and social dimensions of teaching/constituting language and identity. However, no real opposition to the normalization and standardization processes are treated here; and neither the critique to the self-evident nor the development of awareness to the manipulations to which they are exposed are being treated in this project. The project does not refer to their collective memories, and their abolished and unacknowledged rights by the hegemonic group is not the target of this learning process: The process refers to the reading competence of supposed politically-neutral students. The teaching materials and the texts are all taken from the normal curriculum and are not directed against the hidden project of hegemonic education as normalization violence that calls for counter-education: basically, the process aims at nothing more than improving the level of the students’ achievements in school and in life, according to the hegemonic expectations within an oppressive order.
The instrumental orientation of this schooling process is revealed when it is shown that within its framework even the denotation of social relations in the discourse, around and within texts, is ultimately revealed to be another instrument for promoting the academic achievements of the students in accordance with the hegemonic expectations: the more a group of students improves its so-called positive-social behavior the better is the chance that its members will be involved in a “high quality learning process” (Hertz-Lazarowvits 1988: 11). Hertz-Lazarowvits suggests teaching “intersubjective skills” as early as possible - before the teacher enacts the cooperative group learning, namely, as a preparatory stage for successful learning. With all its importance and progressive elements it is impotent to notice that even here the relationship to the Other and to the self-esteem become an instrument for promoting “achievements” that the hegemonic ideology determines as worthy. A critical reading of the specific programs of this version of literacy reveals in detail to what degree it reproduces the power relationships and the given hierarchies in Israel. This is so to a degree that one of the students is appointed to the post of “the “watchman” of time who is in control of “the good words” - trying to empower students and strengthen the positive aspects that are in the group” (Ibid. 12). In our mind, in the current Israeli socio-cultural context, bearing in mind the real economic, social struggles, cultural and emotional trends, this concept of literacy is to be seen as being at the same level as the Panopticon and the development of the status of knowledge, as analyzed by Michel Foucault.
The Panopticon as an architectural form and
as an idea was constituted towards the end of the eighteenth century, in
order to secure institutionally (in schools, jails and hospitals) the student/prisoner/patient
as an object of inspection and control. The transparency of the human space
and its rational control were meant to prevent evils (Foucault 1980: 153)
as part of the production of the modern French citizen. In the new literacy
the system is no longer satisfied with towers and inspectors and with explicit
regulations of external centralized control (which can easily be acknowledged,
criticized and resisted), as in the case of the Panopticon: in the post-industrial
society the normalization/repression process is supposed to be fully and
subtly internalized. Now the system’s rationality is supposed to evolve
from within the controlled inmates themselves, namely, students who are
taught “live skills” and “intersubjective capacities” in an anti-dialogical
manner (Buber 1965: 86), skills such as flexibility that are needed for
the efficient reproduction of the system in which other capacities, needs
and knowledge are irrational, irrelevant and do not promise “success” as
in this project. Yet there is still a need for a watchman who will guard
“good words” - only that in contrast with the original Panopticon, in today’s
sophisticated Panopticon the watchman is one of the inmates themselves,
and the literacy that she will purchase, with that of the others, will
pay its fair share to the withdrawal of the demand for dialogue, to the
“totally different” and for the constitution of motivations, perspectives
and goals for struggle and resistance to the current order. The omnipotent
penetration possibilities of mass communication and educational and teaching
strategies - electronic and cooperative such as the one that Hertz-Lazarowvits
is introducing - end up in normalizing and fully controlling even these
potential oppositions by enclosing them as an integral element of the system.
Counter-education and possibilities for an alternative literacy in Israel
In opposition to the literacy as currently activated in Israel, within the framework of counter-education (Gur-Ze’ev 1998a) literacy is overcome as part of a negative utopia. It concerns a dialogue, which aims at convergence of horizons and mutual constitution. Such a kind of literacy is a reflective glimpse at the utopian dialogue that we are - or to the discourse that blocks the dialogue or the struggle over the possibility of the dialogue which we could have realized. By the same token such a literacy is a political practice, and a moment of socio-cultural struggle and critique. In the concept of dialogue that we introduce we refer to the kind of fusion of horizons that is actualized in cultivating authenticity and conceptualization potentials as suggested by Charles Taylor within the framework of his project of discursive understanding (Taylor 1995: 118). Here understanding is not a revelation of an absolute, eternal and objective truth, but rather as a process in which self-constitution, responsibility to the otherness of the Other and openness to the not-yet are being dialogically addressed. As in Adorno’s concept of dialogue it is always also a concrete socio-cultural and historical intersubjective process.
In our opinion, in this context language not only contains the words we use, but also other expressive modes as mediated by art, sport, and love. We think that the acquisition of a language and the realization of the writing and reading competence, let alone a dialogical self-constitution or a struggle over the possibility of a critical dialogical fusion of horizons, is always framed within a concrete socio-cultural context, reproduces or challenges a certain tradition, and is a product of certain power apparatuses that determine the curriculum, who will learn, what is to be learned, who will not learn, as well as who will be the teacher, what pedagogy and what language will be permitted, encouraged or restricted and which histories are forbidden to the sight of the students who learn to read (Apple 1979: 7). However, at the same time, language might be much more than that. This is since language is the home of reflection. Even the issue of cognitive development and the psychological conditions for the acquisition of lower and higher reading capabilities is basically a philosophical issue and a political praxis which is to be understood in the context of ideology critique and in the context of concrete conditions for inter-cultural discourses and for different truth productions within the framework of each rival system.
In its present mode, the literacy discourse in Israel neglects these dimensions, even in projects that have been explicitly emancipated from the ideology of the supremacy of the expert, except, of course, the expert for literacy (Kuzuminsky 1993: 32). Most Israeli scholars who develop today’s literacy are apparently not aware that the teaching of reading and writing is always possible as part of a life and death struggle between rival histories, identities and interests of different systems and groups and within them. As functionalist-oriented they cannot but become indifferent to the utopia of a dialogical struggle within each speech community and between speech communities as well as to the dialectics between pessimism and utopia in language as something which is more than a special human tool.
The theory and practice of teaching/learning and the writing/reading of texts as here mentioned emphasize the need to challenge the successes of hegemonic, as well as marginalized power apparatuses, which are present in the schooling process and in education in general. It denotes the special role that these manipulations have on securing the impotency, the standardization and the productivity of subjects that function as objects of their systems. In opposition to this reality, the theory here introduced suggests a different concept of subject, autonomy, knowledge, schooling and cultural reproduction. By empowering the possibilities of de-coding the self- evidence and the manipulations, which creates and changes consensus and fashions, it enhances resistance and refusal as well as the introduction of alternative capabilities, bodies of knowledge, images of knowledge and political order.
Counter-education sees the relevance of postmodern works but does not give up the Utopia of traditional critical philosophy and the emancipatory tradition (Gur-Ze’ev 1998, p. 486). It always dwells in a discursive context, when the issue is the understanding of intersubjectivity and the individual in her relation to the Other, to the world, to its representation, to herself and to that which is beyond. Reflection treats these relation as textual, relations who demand decision and praxis. They concern the ability to relate reflectively to texts, reclaiming their absent “voices” and deciphering the traces of those whose texts and quests are unredeemable. It cannot offer the promise of redemption that religious “Spiritual” education offers today in Israel nor its secular alternatives as distributed by “literacy” and other successful fashions in today’s Culture Industry. What we are facing is a political and interpretative struggle: a battle in which a subject might struggle against her stolen autonomy without having a realized autonomy or foundation for the justification of the refusal to face the facts, the self-evident and the temptation of present or future pleasures. In contrast to the positivistic optimism common in current Critical Pedagogy it does not promise recollection of real autonomy, an authentic “voice”, a realized dialogue or elevation of present society. It offers, however, a refusal to the logic of the market and the demands of the Culture Industry and actually engages in a (negative) Utopia. This is the only possible way for creating a distance from the present reality, a distance or a perspective which is a pre-condition for any critique and quest for transcendence. This sensitivity to the other than the given, this commitment to something more than mere life and its domesticating pleasures are pre-conditions for reflection (Gur-Ze’ev, Masschelein, Blake 1998) and the Aufhebung of critical literacy.
The other possibility, however, which is more likely, is that the subject will enter this struggle while realizing another self-consciousness, and her struggle will not realize the power, the character and the targets of the unfulfilled human possibilities and openness, but rather that of the repressive power that produces and controls her and transforms the human subject into an object: an agent an a victim of the system and its symbolic exchange which plays with it in the most possible productive way (Baudrillard 1993: 82-83). Normally, these two alternatives are dialectically connected. They are closely linked to always-open possibility of a successful normalization in which education secures the individual’s indifference to the call of being, to the abandonment of the will to challenge the current realm of self-evidence and the restraints on and distortions of her self-constituted identity and the world’s articulation within an ongoing dialogue. There is no “authentic” will, no “true” knowledge or “pure” human aims. And the struggle against the hegemonic power relations, distorted dialogue and manipulative literacy is always amid political and philosophical conditions in the realm of necessity, not in the realm of freedom. And yet, counter-education reminds the openness of being and the unfulfilled human potential as sources for refusing to accept the present order and structural dehumanization. The possibility of the entrance of “the totally other” into historical realities leads to a kind of literacy which deciphers the myths of the “facts” of the present order. The call of the not-yet-realized and the suffering, injustice and extrinsic-constructed pleasurable experiences make counter-education and its literacy an open possibility worthy of being addressed. The specific characteristics of such a future literacy should be determined by the historical moment and the social and cultural conditions.
In Israel such a future literacy should treat the issue of the competence and the issues of justice, of philosophy and of political praxis. It should be implemented as action research that will treat, as an example, the meaning of being a subject within “Israelihood” or being “a Palestinian”. This, while treating existential and political issues such as the right and the competence of Jewish students from Morocco to read and write their history as independent from hegemonic Zionist narrative, but also to change it, as well as to transcend themselves from this collective identity, knowledge and interests, toward a dialogue that will transcend its participants within a negative utopia. In this sense it differs from critical literacy as proposed by the traditional Critical Pedagogy. Another example can be seen in the real possibilities and rights of the exiled sons of four hundred demolished Palestinian villages to re-map Israeli/Palestinian historiography, and tell the currently forbidden story of their lost communities, as part of their struggle over memory, language and texts that depict and represent counter-memory and hope. However, this kind of literacy is also in constant danger of replacing one realm of self-evidence with another. A non-deceptive literacy should enable the individual to struggle to overcome not only the hegemonic but also the marginalized dogmas, not only the modern but also the postmodern symbolic economy.
Within counter-education a subject can struggle for transcending herself within the framework of negative utopianism and the impetus of the hope principle, on the one hand, and the dialogical human essence on the other. However, literacy within counter-education that negates every sort of self-evidence and is committed to overcome every obstacle to transcendence and dialogue does not have to ignore the achievements of Critical Pedagogy as reflected in the literacy of Freire, Giroux and McLaren or some of the achievements of literacy in Israel. It has to consider them seriously as part of a present system to be overcome and transcended.
Even in Israel the possibility of rejecting the present order and criticizing the positive Utopia of the standard versions of critical literacy is possible. This is because being is ultimately undetermined, open and uncontrollable and human beings are also human subjects to the degree to which they are not mere reflections and agents of “their” realm of self-evidence.
Overcoming literacy within counter-education
is, however, harder in Israel since there is no public sphere with a certain
tradition, which allows dialogue among differences. The coalition of the
rising spiritual power of theocracy, the cynicism of postmodernism and
the instrumental-oriented pragmatism of modernistic trend in the Israeli
arena are a great burden on educators who are willing to challenge the
current success of literacy in the Israeli Culture Industry. The struggle
to overcome the present literacy and the order it serves, however, is still
not impossible. This in itself is a good reason not to surrender to the
present production of literacy and the order it represents.
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