Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, University of Haifa
 

Teachers and nation-building

The Zionist enterprise may be considered a model of the formative power of personal and collective consciousness. While being a condition for Zionist productivity, the formative power of private and collective consciousness is also one of its manifestations. This productivity is what I call educational power. At a time of essential cultural change, the degree (but not the orientation) of educational power is measured by its ability to produce a new conceptual apparatus, a new private and collective consciousness, and new conditions for an effective political and military struggle. In the present cultural reproduction, educational power is tested by its ability to minimize, halt, or prevent this historical process. In each case the status of teachers dramatically differs. This is the situation in general, and historically it has been the Israeli one in particular, as will be shown.

     In 1916 Leon Simon, one of the first Zionist educators, wrote:

                 Among all the manifold branches of work that have to be undertaken by a national
                 movement, there is none more vitally important than the work of education. This
                 is  true of a national movement among a people which is already concentrated,
                 to a  greater or less extent, on its own historic soil, but it is robbed of the possibility
                 of full national development, or is in danger of losing its identity through the
                 influences of a foreign culture stronger than its own... Education is, then, the
                 very life-breath of a national movement. But of no national movement is this so
                 emphatically true as of Zionism, which is an attempt to restore national life to a
                 people cut off almost entirely from its ancestral land, scattered over the face of
                 the earth, participating in every culture, speaking all languages, assimilated to
                 all types of national life and thus in constant and ever-growing danger of being
                 split up into fragments.(1)

A. Ne’emann, wrote in 1902 that

                          The history of the teachers federation is nothing but the history of Hebrew
                          education and it is the history of the new settlement movement, the vision
                          of redemption that  motivated the Hovevey Zion to leave the Diaspora and
                          come here. The social vision that created the labor movement is the vision that
                          was active in the hearts of the pioneering educators, a vision of establishing a
                          Hebrew school in Palestine, realizing it, and bringing it to this point. Without this
                          vision, it is unimaginable that one could understand education here and the vital
                          role which the teacher has played in it. Whoever sees our organization as a
                          strictly professional movement ignores the Israeli reality....(2)

Even scholars like Rachel Alboim-Dror who consider education to be the second or third national challenge, after immigration and settlement, , acknowledge that “education is supposed to serve the political aims of the national movement, and to function as a political instrument for social, economic, and cultural change. Education was especially supposed to supply workers for agriculture, workshops, and industry in order to change the structure of Jewish society’s employment structure and cultivate ‘a new Jew’”.(3) There are also scholars who distinguish (mistaken, to my mind) politics, culture, and education owing to their narrow concept of education, perceiving it as the pure practice of power/knowledge dialectics, yet who in the end agree that “a great part of the Zionist movement’s budget was spent on financing educational services, amounting to 40 percent of the entire budget”.(4)

     The constitutive stand of these production practices, which in the narrower sense are generally called “good education”, can be understood only in the context of certain, definite relations. The centrality of these practices is closely connected to the consciousness that will interpret and change these historical conditions. Therefore, in any critical reconstruction and deconstruction of nationalist education, one should begin any study of the stand of texts, teachers, and pupils, by referring to the socio-cultural context of their representation and activation in the Israeli school arena. Here I do not refer to a certain dimension of  Zionist education but to the productivity of its violence. After all, “nationalistic education is defined not by its content and not by its methods, but rather by its goals and achievements”.(5)

     There were no substantial changes in the goals of nationalist education in Israel between 1916 and 1953. In 1953 the aims of education were established in a special law. In it the human subject or the pupil is not mentioned at all. The law does not even refer to schools as places where children are supposed to learn or study.

     In 1916 Simon explicitly defined the grand aim of Zionist education as “part of the colonization movement”,(6) and until the end of the 1970s the collective consciousness remained unchanged in this matter. In the last generation, however, important changes have been manifested in the technological, social, and cultural arena, and these have been of vital importance for the stand of male and female teachers, their political role, and their cultural and social possibilities. To my mind, this is the context of the recent initiatives to change the law of national education. I will argue that it is wrong to disconnect the Zionist answer to the Jewish problem from the question of knowledge and the proper manipulations enacted for its production and distribution. The Zionist project can beseen as a reflection of collective identity of the Diaspora Jew, which was not unconnected to what one of the Zionist educators, Ernst Simon, called “Zionist antisemitism”.(7)

    The Jewish supposed transition from galut (Diaspora) to geula (redemption) was  conditioned by essential change in concepts of knowledge and by the production of new bodies of knowledge as part of the constitution of a new meta-narrative, a unified collective consciousness, and a new collective identity. Texts and writers of constitutive texts played a role here no less important than the changing economic, social, and cultural conditions in the countries where Jews lived and within their own communities. Zionist educational and teaching practices were of extreme importance in the realization of  the Zionist project, and according to my thesis this is the vantage point from which to view the traditional stand of the Zionist teacher. This study refers to a local historical development, but it also serves as a paradigm since the issue here is nothing other than the conditions and the ways in which private and collective consciousness was constructed. Teachers acted as central agents in the era of national formation while struggling amidst rapid changing and non-monolithic contexts. Jewish teachers had to create/restore a language and use it to build a new “Israeli”/”Hebrew” conceptual apparatus, new values, and new political and transcendental aims. The goal of the ideal teacher in the Zionist arena was to constitute the Zionist subject, to legitimize the productive forces of the constitutive myths and to guarantee in all educational means the future of one meta-narrative, one collective memory,(8) one cluster of myths, a single legitimate ground for an effective collective act. Against the system’s subjective point of view, one can say that the will to power or the degree of effectiveness of Zionist education was the foundation of the entire project.

     In the Zionist arena, the link between education and teaching is manifested in the ability to form and inherit those dynamics that will form a different system: ideologically different, and unique in its social and cultural possibilities in terms of the reality of self-evidence, where dominant powers and logic will always be neglected by the human subjects that are manufactured by the Zionist system.(9)  Ideally, it an arena in which meta-narrative has absolute rule with no opposition. The essence of the educational practice as I reconstruct it is here also the essence of the sophists’ education, as Socrates shows in Protagoras: rule over and mastery of the soul and its potentialities.(10)  What Plato attributes to individuals (the sophist and his pupils) is, according to the philosophy of education presented here, ascribable to the collectives, the powers, and the conditions that produce and activate them and the individuals dwelling within each system in such a realm of self-evidence. The extraordinary character of the virtuous individual, the existential dimensions of subjectivity, and the undetermined possibilities of its spontaneity are part of reality - but only within the framework of historical developments and according to the unique and diverse spiritual possibilities of the arena in which they take place.

     In its historical development, the Zionist meta-narrative had to struggle with considerable competition over the hegemonic formation of the Israeli system. Examples are to the battles over the Hebrew language in the new culture, over constituting the nature and aims of schools, and more.(11)

     All the above was a special version of the open education: a life-and-death struggle between competing meta-narratives. It was a struggle over the nature, horizons, and potentialities of the new system. To destroy its rivals, the victorious meta-narrative had to be sufficiently violent: to be persistant and enduring, to be acceptable to conceptions of valid and relevant knowledge and also in its competence to marginalization, destruction and seizure of other bodies and concepts of knowledge no less productive for the self-reproduction of the collective consciousness. Such consciousness would ensure the conquest of the land, the constitution of symbolic and political sovereignty, and the creation of conditions debarring armed and symbolic threats to the victory march of the Zionist project.

     The philosophy of education presented here denotes the usual openness of education in the normalization processes that it produces in mental and institutional frameworks. This philosophy of education emphasizes the textual dimension of events and institutions, much as what Michel Foucault does in Discipline and Punish.(12)  At the same time, this philosophy of education sees the historical dimension and the socio-cultural context as central to any critical reconstruction of  the questions under study. This critical analysis is conceived as a political praxis that reflects, but at the same time might also disrupt, current power relations characterizing the normal and legitimate discourse in the Israeli educational arena in light of the utopia of an epistemic break and new, more human possibilities as foreseen by Jewish tradition and the Enlightenment’s redemptive projects.

     The Zionist movement took advantage of modernistic knowledge concepts and reproduced them for the realization of its own local national version of the modernistic liberation project. The tension between two competing orientations in the Enlightenment’s project - between the erotic-universalistic and the violent-particularistic - is strongly present in the Zionist project as a specific violent-universalistic version of the Enlightenment’s ideals.

     As a spiritual manifestation of modernity, the Enlightenment emphasized that the struggle for its ideals and the battle against formed the modernistic self- evident arena. Among these ideals are the autonomous subject, the historical  progress of mankind, and the realization of reason as preconditions for improved general conditions and self-constitution of the subject as part of universal progress towards the good, the true, and the beautiful. Already in the Renaissance, in the writings of such thinkers as Bacon, Hobbes and members of the Royal Society, knowledge was conceived as power.(13)  In the late eighteenth, the beginning of the nineteenth, the Enlightenment presented knowledge as incubating a universalist emancipatory potential, not solely in an instrumentalist orientation as in the works of Bacon. According to the instrumentalist conception, “human  knowledge and human power meet in one, for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced”.(14)  Other Enlightenment thinkers approved scientific progress in a not entirely instrumental orientation, for examplein the writing of Gotthold Lessing in The Education of the Human Race (15) and Kant in Perpetual Peace.(16)  The French Revolution dramatically demonstrated the limitations and possibilities of political realization of these ideals, in addition to the dialectics between the commitment to truth and its historic realization, which usually emerges as an exceptionally developed version of the reality it challenged and rebelled against. The quest for power invaded erotic quest for Utopia, and erotic longing became domesticated as a regular inhabitant of everyday life. This was a vital part of the normalization process that enables the present post-modern totality of spiritless reality. In the current development stage of self-evidence, the Israelis are locked in one of the systems that it has produced.

     Concrete, material life-possibilities allowed the evolution of the ideals and utopian longings. However, conceptual possibilities ontologically precede the daily reality that frames their realization in concrete historical development and power relations. It is especially important to emphasize such ideals as universal liberation, true knowledge, and  progress for framing the socio-cultural conditions that made possible the development of human educational progress. The schooling about which the Enlightenment thinkers speak has nothing to do with mere storage of “practical” knowledge, but it is obligated to Bildung, to the general and moral education of humanity as long as it is committed to truth and to transcendental values and
aims (17) in the framework of an integrated universal meta-narrative. This belongs to of the German division between Vernunft (reason), wich is committed to truth and supreme objective values, and Verstand (rationality), which refers to the most sophisticated and fruitful subjective adjustment of goals and means regardless of objective truth and value of the given aims.

     In modernity both these orientations had their manifestations: the one, in the tradition of Objective Reason and the other in the tradition of Instrumental Rationality.  Both these accompanied the development of Western tradition from the start, reflecting and shaping the changing social conditions, challenging and invading each another. It is of vital importance to emphasize that within the tradition of Objective Reason the conceptions of the possibilities of the autonomous subject as reasonable anfd independent, and as the ideal language possessor (with its symbolic and social possibilities) developed. This tradition also understood language as omnipotent and human beings as a reflection of its potential. These two dimensions of the Objective Reason tradition are manifested in the Greek word logos, which refers to the speech act, language, and reason.(18)  In certain historical stages, like that of the Greek sophists, Instrumental Rationality had the upper hand, and in others, as in Christian medieval Europe, Objective Reason (in the form of the Catholic Church) realized in the political sphere the ontological essence of the concepts and myths of the realm of self-evidence. In themid-nineteenth century the modernistic achivements manifested by scientific progress and political transformation to parliamentarian democracies were accompanied by a dramatic increase in the role of  Instrumental Rationality and the bureaucratization of the public sphere, as Max Weber and Max Horkheimer showed.

     In constituting the unique Zionist system, Zionism synthesized two different realms of self-evidence; it conduced an original synthesis between Jewish tradition and one of the central courses of modernity, namely national liberation. The connecting line was the universalist dimension, and it was an entirely new meta-narrative including those dimensions that were supposed to make possible the synthesis between the theoretical and the practical, the religious and the philosophical and scientific, the temporal and the eternal.

     The secular Zionist project also included since its offspring a humanist consciousness, both in its socialist and in its liberal versions. This is also true for the archeology of Zionist knowledge. I do not intend to contrast this archeology of knowledge with a positivistic reconstruction of historical “facts”, but to complete and challenge this archeology of Zionist knowledge (and knowledge about the Zionist self included) with the history of its political realization. Such a dialectic is the methodological aim of this study.

     An anti-humanist and anti-reason stand has been a vital element of Zionism since the beginning of the historical success of the Zionist project and the essence of its materialization (conquering the territory, capitalizing on its wealth, and dictating its cultural identity). At the same time, the political realization of this utopia constructed an anti-reason stand, what Max Weber called Zwekrationalitaet, where the supreme yardstick is the national, ethnocentric, aim.(19)  Yet universal libertarian attitudes were vital to the Zionist project, from the Jewish and the humanist tradition, being present in its secular and religious, as well as socialist and liberal versions. Of course, none of the versions was a monolith, and the same dialectic is present in  the Enlightenment itself, as in the Jewish redemption tradition. Zionists like Ernst Simon and Martin Buber  were conscious of this basic problem of Zionism. In today’s cultural discourse, more and more people claim that there is no need to critically reconstruct the tension between national liberation and universal liberation, namely, the opposition between the emancipatorian and the repressive dimensions in the universal liberation vision of the humanistic project. Within the framework of post-colonial culture, critical thinkers like Homy Bhabah, Eduard Said, Eric  Hobsbaum, and Gilles Deleuse claim that this dilemma, being the preference of  national liberation to disable, marginalize, and destroy the “other”, is not a “problem” in humanist tradition but a manifestation of its colonialist essence.  I argue that this is so regarding the essence of one level of humanism or traditional Judaism, but only one of the two I have reconstructed. Even so, it is just to a degree and because Zionism had to produce a suitable knowledge. The tension between the two levels and the two dimensions of Zionism is present in the history and production of Zionist curricula, for example in Zionist geography and Zionist historiography. This is so since “Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye”, as Homy Bhabah puts it.
 

Conflicting trends in zionist education

The formative figures of Zionist education organized the educational possibilities in accordance with how they understood it. The curriculum, the preferred pedagogy, and the didactic were all consciously produced in accordance with the specific needs and as a manifestation of Zionist Zwekrationalitaet. One of the greatest figures in this field, Ben Zion Dinur,  testifies explicitly to this.  The crystallization of Zionist educational success was realized in an era when modernist national European projects had already been established for more than two centuries. Zionism developed as an independent national identity, while Western European nationalism and humanism alike lost their youthful vitality, and new powers were forcing their way, constituting or rather destroying, the public sphere.(20)

     The central figures in secular Zionism, who were all educated in Europe, were committed to the concept of knowledge that originated in the tradition off  Objective Reason. However, the local historical context of Zionism enforced the realization of the Zionist project through knowledge concepts belonging to the tradition of Instrumental Rationality, whose dominance in the second half of the twentieth century became almost total. The efficiency of instrumental knowledge is tested by its ability to appear as non-ideological or “neutral”, with no real threat from the objects of its normalization practices on the one hand or from the bodies of knowledge and the “other” concepts of knowledge that are to be demolished, marginalized, or digested, on the other.(21)  Normally, this dialectic was placed out of sight, and Zionist knowledge was conceived and represented as belonging to the tradition of Objective Reason, as humanist in nature, and as commited to a project with no conflict between national liberation and general human advancement, as in the case of Jefferson and the American Revolution or Mazzini and the Italian Risorgimento. This false collective consciousness formed the paradigmatic texts of Zionism in Israel, such as Megilat Ha’atzema’utt (Declaration of Independence).

     This great secret of Zionist education has three main implications: first, it allowed and provided the productivity of the Israeli evil industry while being out of sight, without its agents being weakened by a bad conscience and semantic confusion. And so, for example, Arabs, being deprived of work is formalized in textbooks and the  collective memory as the “struggle for Hebrew labor”(22)  and Palestinians being deprived of their land termed “Judaization of the Galilee” or “redemption of the land”, and so forth.(23)

     The second implication is the assurance of the intellectual impotence of the Israeli public sphere. This was important for mainstream Zionist politics and for the stability of the institutionalization of the hegemonic ideology and the protection of its product: the Zionist subject or ideal of “the Israeli” as the “new Jew”.

     The third implication is the inability of the Zionist subject to deconstruct the circumstances and the practices by which his or her destiny is determined. It is hard to overestimate the importance of this for Zionist educational practice.

     In Israel this was acknowledged by consistent humanists and radical anti-humanists alike. Thinkers like Martin Buber, Hai Rott, and Ernst Simon felt uncomfortable with the Zionist formation, and they suggested an organized humanist and democratic counter-culture. Yet one has to keep in mind that even those radicals
(and in the formative years of Israeli society to be a democrat was synonymous with being a radical) viewed themselves as Zionists and accepted the Zionist framework as a possible non-ethnocentric, humanist, and democratic arena. The consistent anti-humanist thinkers in the secular Zionist camp had much sharper fore: Uri Zvi Greenberg, Abba Achimeir and Yisrael Eldad are representative figures of this group. They wanted to educate Israeli youth of the pre-state period to be completely liberated from the quasi-humanistic chains typical of the central trend in secular pre-independence Israel. They did not confine themselves to the introduction of new bodies of knowledge, a eugenic attitude towards the body, and politicizing of the soul. They also demanded, by the same token, new knowledge concepts; they understood what was at stake, like in any essential educational manipulation in which power exists to enforce new concepts of (relevant and legitimate) knowledge and identities. T, they hoped, would constitute a real new Jew, “a hero, generous and cruel”, in the words of Ze’ev Jabotinsky. At the same time, the very idea of Zionist education producing “a new Jew” was not an invention of the Israeli right or their inalienable possession. It had been a central Zionist idea from the time of Hovevy Zion and was most popular among the Zionist left. This idea also had concrete and specific manifestations in the history of Zionist education in Israel, as seen in the case of Ziegfrid Lehmann, the constitutive figure of the Ben Shemen youth village.

     The future of Israeli society and the current sickening of Zionism, as a presentation of the prosperity of the social-economic-militaristic construction of Zionism, was already established (though not ensured, since nothing can be “ensured” in history) before the institution of Zionist education, in the era that preceded the establishment of the Israeli state. This may be explained in the basic conflict in Zionist education between the opposing tendencies Objective Reason and Instrumental Rationality on the one hand and as a reflection of two competing tendencies in hegemonic Instrumental Rationality in Israel on the other. Here I will restrict myself to the evaluation of only one dimension, namely the evolution of the educational philosophy of Zionism and the special position in which the Hebrew teacher served.

     In the era of the struggle for independence, the Hebrew teacher was a figure that is not remote from the centers of national charisma. Teachers were rewarded more with cultural capital than with economic dividends, yet step by step, that cultural capital became eroded. This trend is well documented in
research.(25)  According to my thesis, the historical decline in teacher’s social status and cultural role (a process paralleled by the feminization of the profession) is basically explicable as part of the general transformation in the nature and in the practices of Zionist violence. This  phenomenon should be understood as a reflection of the general change in the essence of Western knowledge and the possibilities and orientation of basic Western concepts and myths.
 

Female teachers as agents and victims of the Zionist projefct

Historically, Zionism did not lack male and female teachers. Zionism did not use exclusively male teachers, as it had female students in addition to male students. But even so, historically the male teacher held the distinctive and formidable stand. This position gradually changed alongside Zionist economic and political accomplishments, its rapid decline, and spiritual aging. Aharon Bar-Adon describes the public image and social stand already in the first stages of the advancement of Zionism in Palestine at the turn of the century: “The number of Hebrew female teachers was small, and most of them were only assistant teachers or kindergarten workers (who were not considered  real teachers). The attitude towards them was at the very least paternalistic, if not total mockery”.(26)  The Zionist utopian project, wich by its nature represented the most violent nationalistic version“reality principle”, was also essentially paternalistic within the system it created. The women participating paid the required tribute to the prevailing newly constructed Zionist truths but did not succeed in changing their traditional status. “Even in utopias that speak highly about equality and parise radical changes in the social and family structure, the woman remains outside professional and public life”, says Rachel Alboim-Dror, the historian of Israeli education.(27)

     Rhetorically the Zionist project  was committed to the Enlightenment’s conception of knowledge and its representation as part of universal human liberation via progressive education and humanist establishment of the conditions for the advancement of humanity and the expansion of its human potentials. By the same token, production, representation, and distribution of knowledge in Israel/Palestine were part of the struggle for conquest of the land and production of the Zionist subject.(28)  Victory in this battle demanded erasure of any essential separation between the new Jew as a farmer-warrior, struggling for the geographic territory that Zionism finally conquered, and the teacher, struggling for the exact shape and construction of the parameters of the collective identity, the language of its private and public consciousness, and the structure of the student’s psyche and conceptual apparatus. These were the intellectual and moral dimensions  of the mental space demarcating the conditions of subduing/producing the Zionist geographic horizons. The Hebrew teacher was primarily a special pioneer-warrior whose success in the daily  struggle was a precondition for Zionism to have male and female pioneers, male and female commandos, male and female farmers/workers who “will dress the land with concrete dress”, “purify” and “liberate” the land from its Palestinian Arabs inhabitants. The latter still firmly claim that the land’s identity was formed by their collective identity for the last 1500 years. Other Palestinian Arabs see themselves as descendants of the Canaanites, Hivites and Jebuosites who formed the region’sarea’s identity before the previous Jewish invasion. Despite these strategies of delegitimization of Zionism, the productivity of educational praxis is seen as part of the production process of Zionist and Palestinian normality: violence that produces the claims to the truth and their evaluation procedures, the Israeli and Palestinian realities, and their inevitable clash. From here springs the knowledge concept that materialized in the history of formal Zionist education. This is also the origin of the cultural rewards and the material gains of the teacher, of teacher-student relations, of concepts about legitimate relevant knowledge, social-cultural possibilities, and limitations, and of the stand of the internal (the Jewish homosexual, woman, ultra-orthodox, etc.) and external (the Palestinian, the “goy” in general, the Diaspora Jew, etc.) “other”.

     This is the setting of the teachers within the Zionist project. Other factors also affected their earnings, such as economic prosperity or decline, wars, and the like. However, according to the thesis I present here, their essential status sprang from their stand in the Zionist project and the evolution of central concepts in the realm of self-evidence and the truths, values, and souls it produced. Basically, even at the highest point in Israeli idealism, the  “teacher’s stand was based primarily on intrinsic rewards, especially on prestigious rewards”.(29)  Jonathan Shapira summarizes the accepted mission of these poorly-paid Hebrew teachers as nothing less than “to recreate the Hebrew people and its culture”.(30)  In his Elite With No Followers, he shows how paralleling the phenomenon of teachers as a cultural elite who joined the pioneers, as a social elite Hebrew teachers suffered an inherent weakness in defending their independence and promoting their political strength and cultural rewards. The conscience of their great goal urged them to protect at least their institutional independence, if not their ideological autonomy; but their organization, their social status, and their influence on education worried the heads of the labor movement at that time (the leading political power in pre-independent Israel).(31)  Already since the 1920s, in face of the labor movement’s growing political hegemony, one observes a gradual but steady decline in the social standing and in the salaries of the teachers.(32)

     The formation of a sovereign meta-narrative reflecting/serving the hegemonic Zionisideology is also reflected in the “independent” performance of the teachers as an organization and as agents of forming the private and the collective consciousness. But the major political party, mapai, did not allow even such a “derivation”. Facing steady pressure and efficient maneuvers that brought about the collapse of major strikes in 1931 and 1932, “teachers accepted the politicians’ preeminence, and educated their pupils according to the Zionist values, in terms of the interpretation given to them by the heads of the mapai party. They taught their pupils that the correct way to realize Zionism was pioneering settlement, that the kibbutz was the highest form of settlement, and that national capital would build the land in the proper manner for the realization of Zionism, not private capital controlled by the play of private interests”, and so on.(33)  In this way the symbolic power of hegemonic Zionist education was constituted, ensuring the fertility of the instruments of violent production that was directed to Zionist expansion and prosperity, inside and outside the system, to the collective and the “self”, and to the “others”.

     As one of the dimensions of violence, war is essentially a manly issue: it is one of the manifestations of what Freud called the “Reality Principle”, which guarantees the styled instrumental practices and the constitution and progress of social-cultural space.  Herbert Marcuse called the principle realized here the “Performative Principle”, and he

                         tried to identify certain basic trends in the instinctual structure of civilization
                         and, particularly, to define the specific reality principle which has governed
                         the progress of Western civilization. We designated this reality principle as
                         the performance principle; and we attempt to show that  domination and
                         alienation, as  derived from the prevalent social organization of labor, determined
                         to a large extent the demands imposed upon the instincts by this reality principle.(34)

This principle is central to culture as a male manifestation. Feminization, in contrast, represents the principle which is opposed to that kind of culture and its progress, and from this point of view the woman was conceived by Freud as “opposition to culture”.(35)  The woman is the “other” of the normal male culture, as “the Jew” is of traditional Christianity or “the Arab” is of the normalized Israeli. Yet the woman is also part of the ultimate condition of this culture and a main contributor to it.

     While being the “other” of male culture, the woman becomes an object and not the subject of culture.(36) She might internalize the constitutive myths of the system repressing her, while rebelling against this system and while operating as part of it to her advantage. A woman might fall in with the progress of the dominant male culture and share its “success”, though sooner or later this will be revealed as her defeat, as a woman and as a human being.

     In the history of Zionist education female teachers, like male teachers, functioned as an essential part of the struggle for the realization of Zionism. At their best they struggled “like men” for the formation of collective consciousness and the mental constitution of their pupils, in the setting of Zionist classrooms. I believe it is wrong to explain the special status enjoyed by male teachers, compared with female, within the narrow context of functional explanations. An explanation has to show an understanding of knowledge, and in a functional description no place exists for  right or wrong or for knowledge or principles.

     From a positivistic-functionalist point of view, one can demonstrate the status, the financial rewards, and the cultural capital of teachers as relatively high, compared with some other public service occupations in pre-independent secular Jewish society. One can point to the “fact” of higher education of Jewish malesthan of Jewish females, and give “explanations” about the reality of the male majority  and the female minority in public educational organizations. These dimensions should not be ignored, but they should be included, evaluated, and deconstructed within a general theory aimed at penetrating the essence of the production procedures of Zionist truths. It should reconstruct the manipulation practices of its representation and distribution apparatuses. It also has to critically reconstruct the context of the pedagogical discourse and the ways in which it produced the Zionist subject. Such a thesis has to overcoming traditional differences between modernist and post-modernist traditions of cultural and social critique. Therefore, I think, such a thesis should be a dialogue that deconstructs and evaluates the formative elements of the authorized “facts” that characterize the history of Zionist education. From this perspective, female and male teachers are evaluated as agents of repression but also as objects of formative manipulations. In this light, I ask the following questions concerning the constitutive and formative powers that established the stand and the change of female and male teachers in Israel in the end of the twentieth century.
 

The change in western knowledge and the feminization
of the teaching profession in Israel

On the issue of education, two processes parallel the state of Israel’s success: growing feminization of the teaching profession on the one hand and a steady decline in the status of teachers on the other. This may be understood within the context of the transformation in the essence and stand of Western knowledge, technological developments, and the change in social and cultural structures and relations in the West and in secular Israel.

     Instrumental Rationality’s advancement manifested the interest of control and delimited the efficiency of its strategies operating in the private and public spheres, while minimizing the lines of division between the private and the public. The interpretative-critical interests proved decreasingly relevant to the reality taking shape in the second half of  the twentieth century. This is especially true within the Israeli context. Along these lines one can reconstruct in the Israeli system two major trends, as follows.

     The first, is the traditional, idealistic trend, committed to the modernist ideals of national liberation and the construction of the new Jewish collective consciousness. This trend is totally obligated to certain legitimized bodies of knowledge, those of Objective Reason within the tradition of the concept of objective knowledge, and it is a warrior-repressive trend. But it is not a one-dimensional repressive trend in its essence, since it includes an anti-instrumental concept of knowledge. In its purest form it is patriarchal and hierarchical. Where there is room for female teachers in such a trend, they are supposed to act “like men” at their best, and normally in such a case they successfully reproduce the hegemonic ideology, or else they are forced to play the part of “women”, professionally realizing themselves in their “womanly” aspects. For the system’s well-being, this is necessary to guarantee the conforting, caring, and dormative dimensions of the marginal parts of society or the marginal elements of the warrior-male psyche.  In this sense, at their best women are supposed to perform publicly as nurses, teachers, kindergarten workers, and the like, that is, to function as an  enhancement for reproduction of traditional “female” characteristics that ensure the permanence of political impotence among women, on the one hand, and the concrete appearance of social utopia on the other. Either way, in this context, women do not demand, nor can they try, to present the others’ perspective in the dominant meta-narrative. They refrain from presenting their voice concerning the legitimized and accepted relebodies of knowledge and patriarchal power games as they relate to their own reality. They are prevented from legitimately presenting their opinions in the major debate about the yardsticks of knowledge and legitimization, as they are not represented there as bearers of a legitimate educational alternative, the alternative of the female “voice”.

     The second trend that has guided Israeli society’s development springs from the successful violence of Zionist education. It includes the ability to symbolically protect and facilitate the expansion and prosperity of the Zionist project in its economic, technological, and organizational dimensions. In this sense, Israeli society has developed in an increasingly normal way, as in the current Western hegemonic trend. As in some Western societies, technological and economic progress has demanded the “democratization” of hegemonic knowledge. The advanced capitalistic marketing and distribution of knowledge, like any other commodity, has sterilized this knowledge of its antagonistic dimensions, as well as its reflective potential that characterized it in in Western tradition,(37)  especially within the tradition of Objective Reason. The parameters within this new image of knowledge are performance, function, its efficiency, and productivity. Performance of this kind may be rationally examined only within a performative space,(38)  and this too only as a function. The functionalist examination of knowledge and the functionalist critique of reality and their analysis of the ways that fertility and efficient function of knowledge are produced presuppose the present reality as the only legitimate and relevant point of reference. The present reality itself, even if it is perverted, is not conceived as deserving critical evaluation or deconstruction. According to this ideological philosophy of science in principle the legitimacy and the omnipotence of present reality is an incontrovertible precondition, and only within the functionalist framework is there room for relevant theoretical work. Only within these limits is there meaning to studying “facts” and theories about these “facts”. This is a conservative positivistic stand which, in my view, contrasts the main Jewish tradition and the essence of Enlightenment’s humanism, as two manifestations of Objective Reason that are still very relevant, especially in face of the current success of functionalistic ideologies in science and education.

     In its new, anti-erotic form, neutral to the utopian axis and to value commitments, the denial of spiritual autonomy and the refusal of Utopia become a precondition for the effective functioning of women and men as agents, as conformist/efficient producers/consumers. Advancement in social and economic competition is feasible only by the capitulation of narrower bodies of knowledge that are ever more precious and dear from the viewpoint of Instrumental Rationality. This process, which is increasinly stimulating and intensive in the second half of the twentieth century, allows a growing feminization of the teaching profession in the current educational market, paralleled by the deterioration of the social status and the reduction in economic rewards of teachers in advanced capitalism. Local capitalistic developments in local systems, as in Japan and Germany, modify this thesis but they do not negate its general validity, certainly not in the Israeli context. According to this thesis, there is a historical tendency which dictates that as a capitalistic educational institution includes more female teachers, the status of the institution will decline, and correspondingly, the cultural capital of its students and the economic rewards of its functionaries will decline as well.

     According to the Statistical Abstract of Israel,(39)  in 1948-49 there were 4153 teachers in elementary Hebrew schools, 2328 (56%) of them women. In comparison, in 1992-93 there were 40,373 teachers in the elementary educational institutions, 90.4% of them women. If, as is likely this trend continues, women will constitute close to 100% of the total teacher workforce in the very near future. In high schools the same trend is evident though more modestly.

     In 1992-93, at all teacher-training institutions, there were 4150 teachers, of whom 2438 were women, 1650 were men, and 62 were described by the Central Bureau of Statistics as “unknown”. On the one hand, the data here, as in the other educational institutions, reflects women’s social mobility. However, even from the statistical point of view the picture is far from marvelous. Even an uncritical analysis of the data shows that (while neglecting the “unknown” sex of 62 teachers) 568 of the teachers holding BA degrees were women, as compared with 261 men. Among the MA holders, 647 were men and 1159 were women; as for Ph.D. holders, the ratio was 603 men to only 285 women. Here too one sees that the feminization process of the educational institutions is slower as the institutions involved are more prestigious. However, even the more prestigious institutions cannot effectively resist this trend, which is vividly present there as well, albeit in a more temperate form. I do not want to delve into this issue with its reactions and counter-reactions, involving greater understanding of the capitalistic opportunities of “improved” schooling in technologically advanced societies like Japan, and the influence it has on female and male teachers’ status in these societies. Here I will direct my critical reconstruction solely to local Israeli conditions.

     The stand of the Israeli female teacher is determined at a confluence of those capitalistic technological-social-cultural trends that have been reconstructed in this paper in their most general Western context. In today’s Israel, the teaching profession is for most women a move up from lower social status and lower income professions - a profession, not a vocation. Even if in its present form the Israeli school is open for limited social integration from different socio-economic backgrounds, today it functions as a much more efficient socialization instrument for female teachers. This success is rapidly losing ground as the trend develops. This opportunity to rise in social status is open to Jewish womwn of lower socio-economic status, mainly from Arab countries (Sepharadim), and to Palestinian women, who gain the economic power and social status that enable them to gradually change the traditional structure of the Israeli Palestinian family and society.

     The dominant social developments in Palestinian society in Israel are, in various aspects, different from those that characterize Jewish society in Israel, being slower and more moderate. This parallels the general reality of obstructed opportunities (as a collective, not as individuals) to obtain positions in the public service and  to integrate in civic institutions and, to a lesser degree, in private organizations, in contrast to the typical Palestinian occupations like agriculture, construction, and motor mechanics. This reality is undergoing rapid change due to knowledge instrumentalization and “objective and neutral” performance criteria as the market’s supreme criteria in post-Zionist Israel. Nevertheless, this trend is taking place on the fringes of society and is very fragile and threatened by nationalistic clashes and crises ahead of us. A positivistic analysis of the occupational integrity of Palestinians in Israel (in the public sector) might conclude that the situation is far from dreadful.(40)

     I do not accept the positivistic research and the functionalist analysis. The conclusion that Palestinians are well integrated in the public occupational market in the middle and in high posts is of more value in a study of the politics of positivistic statistical maneuvers and deserves critical deconstruction. Historically-oriented research sensitive to the possibilities of critique of ideology (but not restricted to it) might draw different conclusions. Research that also attempts to study the issue from the victims’ point of view and reconstructs of their marginalization, while establishing an unproblematic, “scientific” discourse on the issue, will probably result in a different picture.

     A critical study might bring to light some improvement of the occupational situation of the Palestinians in Israel. By the same token, it might highlight their marginalization before, during, and after their educational development and their integration in the Israeli capitalistic system. This is an important part of the context in which the state educational institution has become the major factor in Israeli Palestinian’s possibilities for social and cultural mobility. This is why the Israeli-Palestinian sector’s educational system in Israel is more male -dominated than the Jewish sector’s. In his research on social developments facing Palestinians in Israel,  Palestinian sociologist Majid Al-Haj concludes that education has become the chief prestigious asset and has inherited the place traditionally held by land in Palestinian society in Israel.(41)  However, technological progress and the enlargement of production, distribution, and service agencies in Israel have also had their influence on Palestinian society. The logic that these are only its manifestations also constitutes new concepts, myths, and values in Palestinian society which deconstruct and transform the old ones. This exerts its influence on the attraction of teaching occupations and on attitudes towards teaching, a profession that even in Israeli Palestinian society is experiencing a rapid feminization process.

     The integration of Israeli Palestinians into the relatively prosperous economic development  of Israeli society might be evaluated, at least partially, by the feminization process of teaching in Arab schools in Israel. According to the data I collected at the Arab Institution for Development of Educational Workers in Beit Berl,(42)  in 1972, 70 students 30 of whom were women and 40 were men graduated. In 1981, 67 students graduated, 46 of them women and 21 men. In 1991, 60 Palestinians graduated the Institute, of whom 50 were women and 10 were men. By 1995 the ratio was 82 women to 9 men.

     A positivistic study would refer to the data as a manifestation of Israeli Palestinian integration in middle-status positions in public institutions. Such an analysis would no doubt praise the number and percentage of female Palestinians obtaining positions as teachers. A critical deconstructivist would reconstruct the general context, the ideological orientation of the functionalist-positivist analysis. This kind of analysis would have to emphasize that the opportunities given to Israeli Palestinian and Jewish women in Israel are part of a process in which the knowledge they are transmitting is conceived as decreasingly relevant and rapidly losing its traditional status, and as no longer considered vital to any level of technological or economic advancement. This conclusion is increasingly valid even for the role and status of universities as research institutions.(43)

     Men who head the social and cultural developments or are driven to its margins  have seized the more competitive and prestigious occupations, in which today one can realize the productivity of chauvinist energy. In Israel these new spaces are closer to the significant developments of current capitalist society and are perceived as more prestigious and relevant, and accordingly provide men or “manly women” with greater rewards.

     Traditionally, it was impossible to distinguish among four teaching dimensions: A. the teacher as an educator. B. the teacher as an agent of transmitting privileged bodies of knowledge. C. the teacher as a reproducer of concepts about knowledge that were essential parts of the realm of self-evidence and therefore were viewed as valid and as parameters for the validity of claims and claims about facts. D. the teacher as a repression agent in the service of hegemonic power focuses in existing power relations, commissioned to marginalize and destroy alternative concepts about relevant knowledge, self-interests, and identities. This last was intended to secure and productively activate the normalization practices of the existing system or its establishment. For example, teachers who presented the geography of Palestine/Israel were the vanguard for ensuring the successful mythicization of this knowledge and making it a vital part of the mental constitution of their pupils. They were the ones who ensured the self-evidence of geographical “facts” about Israel and the abolistion of “Palestine” and Palestinian identity as “fact”. Namely, they were the producers of the factuality of facts, not “just” their representatives. They were a vital element in the production of the Israeli subject and the Israeli system.

     Within this meta-narrative, Israel was basically always Eretz Israel, not a mere territory about which the teacher introduced to his/her students parts of relevant information. Eretz Israel was much more than that: it was a grand transcendental ideal. Geography is suggested here just an example for all traditional Zionist bodies of knowledge that were relevant (in secular Jewish Israeli society) until the last generation.

     The Zionist success, in economic levels and in advancing the efficiency of symbolic production, representation, and distribution, also allowed dominant Western cultural processes to be realized in Israel. On the one hand, this was made possible by the relative security, prosperity, and self-esteem. On the other hand, the realization of these processes became necessary since they were part and parcel of Western capitalist developments, new technologies  and new concepts about knowledge. These provided the means for introducing and activating the new bodies of knowledge that stimulated Israeli industry and scientific knowledge. At least in the Israeli case, the two seemed inseparable: Zionism could not advance, institutionally, without making use of new bodies of knowledge and detaching them from the concept of knowledge that made them possible and incubated them  and their social and other material manifestations. As a result of being involved in a permanent military, economic and cultural struggle, both externally and internally, Zionism had to compensate for its inferiority in size and resources by developing technological and economic ability. The Zionist instrumental attitude and the Jewish educational system (along with massive foreign aid) made this process possible.

     Part of the rationalization process of merchandise at this historical stage of capitalism was the reification of human relations. From a transcendental dimension wich has social relevance, knowledge became a “thing” with no “otherness” or transcendental dimension, merchandise like anything else, whose purchase has only one valid parameter: sheer practicality. As the crystallization of this evolution  education, which once was a vocation, changed its essence and its social status. Teaching increasingly turned into the transmission of information and practical knowledge, a kind of marketing in mercantilist space, in a historical situation where knowledge was expected to be more and more “practical”, “useful”, and “efficient” - disconnected from any idealistic, moralistic, or aesthetic transcendent orientation. The logic of the market spilled over into the educational arena in one generation made it a vital element of a new culture industry. The erotic/idealistic educational dimension that Zionism saw as indispensable (and the bodies of knowledge conceived as the means for its incubation and flourishing, or even as being of equal value) has been eroding from the 1960s until today, when nothing much is left of it. The quintessential dimension of Israeliness in our days is lo li’hyot frier (not to be stooge by acting morally),(44)  and it is vital as a manifestation of the current historical standing of knowledge in Israel and the possibilities still open for the teaching profession.

     This is not to say that Zionist education was not instrumentally oriented from its very beginning, in the sense that bodies of knowledge which were declared legitimate and relevant at schools were always mobilized to serve the Zionist project. The teacher’s goal was to shape the young Zionist psyche according to the Zionism’s  needs and to reproduce the hegemonic meta-narrative as a major dimension of the reality of self-evidence and its local system with as few impediments and challenges as possible. However, even traditional Zionist education was historically confronted with internal as well as external threats and challenges, and it has now been changed.

     A century of secular Zionism also had to face the challenges of the remainders of Judaism, galutiut, as well as the humanist ideals of the Enlightenment and other representations of Objective Reason’s tradition. However, their appearance in the system was marginal and abused.
 

The vocation of female teachers in a post-Zionist Israel

In the closing years of the twentieth century we face a new stage in the development of Instrumental Rationality. In secular Israel we are facing such an instrumentalization of knowledge that there is no more living expression of the tradition of Objective Reason’s in its two local manifestations - traditional Judaism and the  Enlightenment’s ideals. In today’s secular education there is practically no room for any ideals whatsoever, and it lacks any spirituality. But, while the present historical stand of knowledge might be seen as entirely analogous to the one common in other Western societies, current Israeli education has its unique features.

     An important aspect of present Israeli secular education is that it is completely disconnected from Jewish tradition, and in this respect it is utterly ruthless, with no obligation to any collective transcendent or practical goal, and is really post-modern. By the same token, in the educational arena there is no vivid presence or even remnants of  humanist ideals and basic concepts. This is different from other advanced capitalist societies like the Japanese, the American, or even the British, where traditions, while digested as part of the local culture industry, still have some relevance, as in the case of religion in America, and might become a focus of refusal, opposition, and critique against the new rational-instrumental  realm of self-evidence. In the Israeli case, Instrumental Rationality does not face any challenge or resistance from the vast majority of society, which is perceived to be secular. At most, its hegemony creates uneasiness from what is understood as lack of personal (transcendental) goals or lack of spirit.

     One should not underestimate uneasiness or other cracks in the general satisfaction, which guarantees and reproduces the prevailing hegemonic ideology with no need for censorship, secret agents, and other obvious normalization and repression apparatuses. In the current conditions prevailing in the range from gaily to gravity, conformity has the upper hand. This is why uneasiness, gravity, and unspoken anger are so important,  I belive. Their bruteness presents the implicit demand for an alternative to sublimation and high cultural traditions that were sources of rebellion, refusal, and critique in earlier historical stages.

     On the other hand, one should not overestimate the current role that these aspects plays since they, as traditional utopian potentials, are regularly and systematically recruited to serve the hegemonic systems in the realm of self-evidence of “our” post-modern world. Uneasiness, anger, fright, and all kinds of “perverseness”, as well as all kinds of alternative social institutionalization and intellectual opposition, are all forced to play the role set for them by the internal logic of the system. The only “aim” of this aimless system is to reflect and further the current realm of self-evidence and its basic concepts and symbolic/material potentialities. In this sense, today there is no more validity to traditional emancipatory concepts like repression, and there is no use for old versions of ideological critique that emphasize concepts like estrangement. Therefore, today’s critical theory should not restrict itself to the negation of the present reality: it should combine this imperative with the negation of old optimistic-positive-utopianism.(56)

     Today’s Western capitalistic systems are not irrational and repressive, as in Marx’s thinking. Nor are they to be criticized and negated for not being rational and for creating estrangement. However, they are to be rejected because of the mode and the degree to which they have neutralized estrangement and because of their (instrumental) rationality and general efficiency. In this sense the system is not “repressive”, and there are no rational social actions to confront here. Even ideology critique from a social-cultural libertarian instrument, has been reified by its enemies and devotees and has been transformed to an object of consumption, as spiritless transcendentalist dogma. “The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification and its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Culture criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism”.(45)

     In such a reality, there are no values and ideals to educate for, in the traditional sense of the word: no value or aim has a transcendental and objective status from which it is possible to challenge current reality or struggle for a reasonable social consensusdevoid of power manipulations. The power maneuvers of daily reality are the only space from which it is possible to judge, the aims, limitations, and potentialities of this given reality. The systems within the horizons of the post-modern realm of self-evidence that is being formed in our era are perceived as developing contingently and are producing contingency as a prime element of collective consciousness, with no “aim”, “foundation” or “meaning”. This Western realm of self-evidence is establishing in the local Israeli system the current stand of knowledge and its agencies. It also acts as a main force dictating the stand of Israeli teachers, who have no relevance even as teachers, let alone educators.

     Teachers are conceived by their students as having no part in relevant knowledge production, even as knowledge transmitters. Moreover, they are seen as having no real understanding of the knowledge that they are supposed to transmit to their students. More than any other dimension of vital importance is the general feeling that present-day school knowledge is outdated and irrelevant, and that the school itself does not serve and cannot serve its traditional adductive and schooling missions.

     In our era general education, especially in the “great books” tradition, is no longer conceived as having real value or as holding important patronizing-repressive value. In suspicion of apathy towards, or militant negation of the “great book” tradition, multi-culturalists, feminists, post-modernists and their mainstream functionalist rivals are united. The very possibility of preserving a living connection with this tradition is questioned (46) in an era in which fashion inherits the traditional place that objective truths and transcendent values once held. In the post-modern realm of self-evidence, there is less and less room for tradition at all, not only the hegemonic tradition. The school is a dinosaur from an era that no longer exists in the most advanced spaces of the Western public sphere. In the Israeli context, to the degree that school is still conceivable and its staff considered an agency transmiting a valid tradition and relevant bodies of knowledge, it is at the same time also generally understood as a repressive institution  that obligates the acceptance of unwelcome “material” in unpleasant and depressing conditions.

    The intellectual discourse, the theoretical stance in itself, and the reflective potentialities are deemed by the educational system, as by many teachers, more irrelevant than a threat or bothersome commitment. They have lost their relevance as they are conceived as not “practical” or target-oriented.(47)  By the relevant parameters of present-day Instrumental Rationality that is dominant in most (but not all) Western systems, there is no room for intellectuals and no need for a critical theoretical/social stand, still less considering the role of intellectual teachers of the kind for whose development Henry Giroux is working.(48)  In Israel the governmental secular school functions as a transitory stage and as the selection and reproduction instrument of the present social and ideological hegemonic hierarchies. In such schools only two aspects of education are still possible.

     In such a schooling space, the role of the institution is to reproduce knowledge and to reduce it to constitutive myths of Zionism. Schooling should function as the grand protector of the basic concepts of traditional Zionism: concepts such as bravery, loyalty to the tribe, self-sacrifice for the tribe, and the like.

     Today, after more than a century of Zionist education, the effectiveness of this kind of education is diminishing, reflecting the erosion of Zionist Geist. The same phenomenon may be seen from another angle, namely the successful penetration of the inner logic of the capitalist market as an explicit, legitimate, sole ruler, as a reflection of the new general  realm of self-evidence, in which everything is commodity and the sole “value” is the market price. 1995-96 was proclaimed officially, by then the (so-called “leftist”) Ministry of Education, as “The Year of the Industry”, not in the Bolshevik tradition but in accord with the Reaganist-Thacherite ideology of the supremacy of “the market”. This was represented and praised as the supreme point of reference which, from a functionalist point of view, does not differ from the function of obsolete traditional truths from which transcendental aims were established and appropriate pedagogical means were deduced.

     Current Israeli privatization of schools and fragmentation of curricula according to changing fashions and rotating needs of the local market ensure the validity of “excellence” in its performance, as preached by T.Q.M. experts and other, more up-to-date functionaries. However, it is wrong, I think, to restrict critique to these issues, which themselves are to be contextualized within the framework of the changing stand of Western knowledge and teachers as subjects and as objects, in and as part of its threat to change pedagogy, curriculum, and even school architecture.

     The general developments reconstructed here have made possible the new orientation and the new possibilities and limitations of Israeli secular schools. Today, Israeli schools function as an effective educational apparatus only to the degree that they reproduce images and bodies of knowledge relevant to participating in myths of consumption like that of the luxurious car or villa. In the post-modern era that Israeli society has entered in recent years, the school can protect its relevance only by using culture heroes and sex stars (or as they are called in Israel “blasts”) like Michael Jackson, Madonna, Robert Maxwell, Shoul Eisenberg, and local figures of this kind. To attract clients, high schools are trying to open exotic and extravagant programs such as law studies for beginners, advertising, modeling, movie-making, and the like. Post-modernity is not seen in the same degree and manner in different localities; in some poor peripheral schools, old myths may still have some relevance, even for secular students, with some modifications. The post-modern condition to which I refer  is much more extensive in the middle-class and yuppie social spaces, but even so, the death of the Zionist spirit is present everywhere, even if in different formations, as “the Israeli” devolves to various collective identities.

     In such circumstances, the reproduction tendency of the system is trying to protect itself by utilizing the new heroes in the service of the dying gods. Such is the case in the way that the establishment treats the most popular Israeli pop singer, Aviv Geffen. The school is becoming a mere reflection of consumption mobility in the open market and is contributing its share in the reproduction and intensification of the developments that essentially it must to destroy, or else be destroyed by them.

     Real education, the formation of the conscience, and the construction of the soul which guarantees the smooth regulation of men and women as efficient producers/consumers, as clever, cynical anti-intellectuals, is mainly realized outside of the formal schooling process. By its “nature”, the current formal schooling space cannot return to the position and power it lost more than a generation ago. It is too fragile to become, again, an arena of reflection and mainly construction of one, ethnocentric, collective identity, with concepts about (relevant) knowledge, values, and interests. As the last election proved, Israeli society is dissolving into fractions and essentially different interest groups and ethnic identities competing inside and outside parliament  over resources and powers on a strictly separatist and opportunist basis. Yet the establishment does not give up, and is probably still not even aware of the role the school really plays in current Israeli culture and society. The trend towards separation of lower socio-economic levels of secular Jewish groups from the secular middle class with its rapid atomization and extreme individualization is well under way. While these development gather momentum, the privatization of educational institutions and their market orientation is developed rapidly and “successfully”, serving the competing developments. Basically, the secular educational system is still explicitly anti-pluralistic, so teachers are challenged with conflicting demands: on the one hand they are supposed to be relevant, “open”, to acknowledge different backgrounds of their pupils and different potentials and area of interest. On the other hand they are strictly commited to a unified curriculum, to the hegemonic interpretation, and to the Zionist jargon and myths. They are forced into anti-intellectualism, anti-humanism, and anti-democratic and real pluralist attitudes. As a result the school, as is generally recognized, does not train and prepare the inmates arrested in it for the real world outside its walls as long as it is stiremainsll a Zionist school. The real training for what is conceived as the pantheon of reality, namely the job market, occurs in institutions like universities, and especially in small, specific private training institutions. Two social justifications exist for operating schools under such conditions, very different from the justifications of the political elite’s calculations and interests. One is to disarm young people, especially young males, of their potential revolutionary impulse in its sexual, emotional, and intellectual dimensions and to reproduce in their conscience other facets, including the most remote and elementary, in the service of the local system. The second justification is the activation of a preliminary social selection and hierarchy building, in which the reproduction of existing power relations in the market is possible.(49)
This double function of schools in today’s Israel is guaranteed by apparatuses so complex that their power is much more effective and penetrating than those which operated in previous stages of Zionist schools in Israel. All these developments place teachers in an impossible situation as people, as educators, and even as good teachers in the strict traditional sense of the word. The politically radical, intellectual, and emotional potentialitials still open to teachers in Israel makes Ivan Illitch’s demand for abolishing schools as mere Utopia in the naive sense.(50)
 

Feminization and false emancipation

 In these circumstances, in which conformist-oriented “success” in market competition is the ideal, it is not surprising that the more competitive Israeli males, those with higher self-esteem, will act rationally, according to Instrumental Rationality and the prevailing fashion, and will act in line with the market imperative. Insofar as they are rational and possess adequate potential, they will not see the teaching profession as a suitable job for them; they will not even see education as a vocation. Therefore, teaching and education, while in the most recent stage of Israeli history having become irrelevant and disconnected from the prevailing myths of the present culture industry, have become a job for the weaker socio-economic strata of society. Teaching increasingly has become an occupation for disadvantaged people and those deprived of opportunities to do something more socially appreciated than teaching. It also provides an opportunity for these people to appropriate a tool for compensating their anger and frustration about not being able to participate in the real battle. In other words, teaching has become a “womanish” occupation. This is the background for the current feminization of this profession.

     This development would have been impossible without the structure of Israeli society as it is today in the systematic discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel, against the sepharadim, and against Jewish women in general, as part of the realization of the concrete Jewish orthodox halacha as an essential part of the legal system, given that the Jewish religion is the state’s official religion.

     Women’s liberation from traditional and limiting ways of life has also been facilitated by their changing economic role at “home” and outside the “home”. In the  current social and cultural circumstances, women’s liberation is not manifested solely at the legal level, for all its importance. It is impossible outside the context of the market, the political conditions of the market, and the power struggles of the financiers. At the same time, the system in which these are some of its universal commanding powers is determined by its concepts, myths, and spiritual possibilities and limitations, as a reflection of its realm of self-evidence. That is why most feminists and anti-feminists alike are missing the philosophical conditions of women’s liberation. Moreover, the general accepted  representations of current conditions serve to strengthen the misleading impression that women are being liberated or that women are about to be liberated on the grounds of present reforms and developments. This is so since it looks as if women are getting better jobs, leaving the confines of “home”, harvesting political power along the way. In Israel the teaching profession enables many women to participate in the struggle for their liberation (or at least to make some advancement in this direction) without entering into jobs such as cleaning, agricultural work, low-level secretarial positions, or in which the work is physically hard, vacations are scarce, and social status (and political potential) is low and problematic.

     In the Israeli system this trend takes different formations than might be evident in other systems. In Israel a handful of men still see themselves as courageous and talented, and even so decide on the teaching profession. There are still many middle-class women in teaching, and not a few of them are efficient and talented teachers in Israeli schools. Furthermore, there are also veteran teachers from the last generation, who still see teaching and education as a vocation, and even now they manage to resist cynicism and practicalism in the name of the old gods and their ancient ideals. Nevertheless, in today’s Israel all these are a derivation or remnants of yesterday’s world.

     In terms of the hegemonic trend in Israeli society, it is reasonable to predict that fewer and fewer teachers will also be scholarship-oriented and posses general knowledge in the Bildung tradition, people with self-esteem and potential for success in the competition of the free market. The advancement of the market-oriented rationalization of Israeli educational institutions will probably ensure the strengthening of the feminization of schools. This trend itself will push/liberate ever lower and weaker socio-economic level women into the profession. This is but a reflection of recent developments in the apparatuses of relevant-knowledge production at the turn of the century. This progress is ratified as well as paralleled by advancing hegemonic concepts of knowledge and the current hierarchies of present social formations.

     One has to see the positive-productive dimension of this development and denote the importance of the historical chance for women’s liberation. This is so since the advancing of lower-strata women and their entrance into such a formative system as education is important for their personal liberation, just as it is important for the entrance of marginalized voices and diverse traditions and knowledge.(51) This trend might also be considered important since for many Israeli women the teaching profession is just a necessary step before continuing their climb to a more respected profession and an improvement in their economic potential and social status.

     To my mind this positive dimension should not be seen in an overly optimistic perspective. This is so since its critical reconstruction shows its vital contribution to the promotion of the order in the current Israeli system and its bestowal to the bettering of the closeness of the realm of self-evidence in which Instrumental Rationality prevails. This positive-productive diminution of teachers’ work reflects and advances the process in which knowledge is transformed into bits of information,(52)  women and men into spaces of urges that were planted there from outside with no internal control or reflection. The “self” and “self-identity” itself become one of the commodities that the market produces and distributes with no “aim” or “meaning”. In such circumstances, human agents become statistical data controlled in a totally rational manner, in order to reproduce the system’s dynamics and to further advance the rational control over “reality” and its “facts”, including individual and collective identities, and knowledge and practices relating to it and reproducing it.

     As in other spaces of today’s capitalist rational control, the relative success of Israeli women in the teaching profession is determined by the degree and the specific character of their participation in the de-humanization processes of their lives and the lives of other people in the educational institutions in which they work. As female teachers,  their work is evaluated and determined in accordance with the achievements in the era of destruction/production: blocking or preventing the spiritual autonomy of the pupils, sterilizing their symbolic space, and disolving the languages, memories, and mentalities that in the past allowed identification with the primitive repression of “others”, but also a degree of spiritual autonomy, struggle for transcendence, and the demand for a new and more humanistic historical stage. In other words, we are dealing here with teachers’ contribution to deportation of reason, within the framework of which it is possible to collectively work for dialogical communicative acts. At the same time, this is a positive and constructive contribution to the trivialization and in practice to the abolition of Jewish and humanist traditions for secular Jewish people.

     Dialectically, these dimensions, which are so central to today’s teachers’ work, are part of the universal conditions for different expressive “voices” and different orientations. But under present conditions in the Israeli arena, such conditions are absent, due to radical critical reasoning and overcoming basic impediments of the system, which are at the same time also the foundations of the prevailing realm of self-evidence. Solidarity has become irrational and serious reflection a matter for bureaucrats or for non-mature types (philosophers, as once they were called).

     The current bodies of knowledge, which are consumed by the new human being as an efficient producer/consumer, turn male and female teachers into agents of anti-humanistic dynamics. Their ability to internalize the logic of the normalization process and their acceptance of intellectual impotence is a precondition for survival, not to mention their success as teachers. In such circumstances, with some modifications, there is room for the traditional female characterization in current educational dynamics: immanent “receptivity” and passivity of the agents in the school arena - in the heart of a society which adores the ideal of “free competition” - make the feminization of the teaching profession a historic imperative.

     Paralleling this process of feminization of the teaching profession and the decline of teachers’ cultural and social status in Israel, more and more women are succeeding in entering the real battlefield: the open market. In today’s Israeli society there is a parallel feminization of such professions as journalism, advertising, architecture, law, and communication. As a rule, the women competing with men under open competition conditions are those driven to see themselves as strong and competent enough not to descend to the teacher’s status. Here there is no place for commitment to an ideal or responsibility to a discipline. It is strictly a preference of one particular life style over another as a representation of self-esteem in the non-philosophical sense of the word. This is from each woman’s own subjective perspective.

     At the same time, an objective false libertarian conscience is being realized. This is so because the gay conscience of feminist liberation manifested here is unconcerned with and unconscious of the powers constructing reality, its representations and its liberation. This liberation is conditioned by surrendering not only “the grand refusal”, but even the modest one to current reality. It is a liberation conditioned by women’s surrendering their identity (determined as autonomically as possible under human conditions), and they are forced to surrender even their (repressed) traditional stand in opposition to hegemonic male-dominated culture.

     In the mid-twentieth century, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer could still nurture some hope for the female essence as an opposition to hegemonic surveillance logic in the current realm of self-understanding and the civilization identified by Freud’s project. That is, since “the division of labor imposed on her by man brought her little that was worthwhile, she became the biological function, the image of nature, the subjugation of which constituted that civilization’s title to fame”.(53)
 

The possibility of an alternative feminist emancipatory education in Israel

In the progressive male-dominated discourse, women were presented as an undistorted manifestation of unrestrained nature, or as an unperverted cultural realization of natural compassion and the capacity for love. At the same time, this discourse gave its share to male dominance in the public sphere and in the cultural discourse. This dominance is of the same family as the vulgar Domination Principle  that they challenged. Yet by the same token the discourse about female essence - even in its appearances in male-dominated orientations - made possible the Utopia of a humane alternative to current reality, something “totally other” than the given. To my mind it is an essential issue, since this premise or this imperative of “the totally other” than the given is a precondition for a critical theory of society, radical political praxis, and counter-education.

     The appearance of growing numbers of women liberating themselves from traditional restrictions does not necessarily represent counter-education and genuine liberation. My impression is that in the Israeli arena what is happening is first of all a refusal of “the grand refusal”, as part of a refusal of anything “grand”, transcendental, non-contingent, practical, and daily. From its very beginning, “refusal” was a male construct, where honor in the military sense was dominant. As a public posture and political act, “refusal” was not considered to be essentially female in the high-culture paradigmatic texts from  Aristotle to Freud. This progressive discourse was essentially non-dialogical and did wonderfully without the active and equal participation of women. At the same time, it also made its contribution to disarming the political potential of women and taking part in such an education that ensured the internalization of repression by women as well as their identification with their repression and devotion to their repressors, which usually was called “love”. And yet, as an internal Diaspora, the female nature that was historically constructed by these dynamics was offering and realizing a real space of “otherness” besides the Domination Principle that male-dominated culture praised and developed. Under the surface of the dominant culture, an alternative was a living ideal and a concrete way of life. Even without idealizing these traditional ways of life among Jewish women as a community, and after considering the actual powers that forced them to be so peaceful and non-violent, on the one hand, and considering the violent expressions that were taking place and are still occurring in traditional communities of that sort, a female alternative is still evident here. This is an alternative that could and should be relevant both to female and male human beings, an educational alternative that I refuse to surrender. The current popular identification with “strong women” and their entering male-dominated combat and the praise for them is a manifestation of the demolishing of a feminist-humane alternative. It is a surrender of the female as well as human utopia. It is the entrance ticket for women into the violent space of free competition and its promised “successes” at this historic stage. Israel does not differ in this respect.

     I do not accept the Platonic or that kind of radical separatist feminism which praises naive essentialism, feminist or male essentialism included. The position I suggest might be seen as an advanced conservative understanding of women’s essence and the political stand of women that is derived from it. It might be seen if I could disallow the entrance of women to the only real space where their practical liberation and self-constitution and ability to sound their own voice is possible. In addition, one might ask, why should women defend, develop, and fight for traditional female essences or alternatives, given the general acceptance of contingency in current liberal discourse? Why should women not constitute for themselves a new female identity, disconnected from the old historical stages ? And does such a thing as “essence” and women’s essence get realized in history ?

     I think that there is such a thing as woman’s essence, just as there is such a thing as human essence. On an ontological and a historical level, this claim must be clarified. “The materialist concept of essence is a historical concept. Essence is conceived only as the essence of a particular ‘appearance,’ whose factual form is viewed with regard to what it is in itself and what it could be (but is not in fact).This relation, however, originates in history and changes history”.(54)  The ontological aspect of the female essence is derived from the dialogical essence of humankind.(55)  The  concept of dialogue implies two differenyet competing essences building the realm where, if it is not distorted, they can realize themselves ideally. Utopically, men and women are the essential elements of the human dialogue. This dialogue is a historical event, and different stages and localities realize differently the essence of men and women. The distortion, the perversion of the dialogue or, as happened in the last century, the transformation of the dialogical track into a discursive, totally violent, historical way of human coexistence, is part of the realization of human potentialities. This is so since human essence is not determined one-dimensionally, and its utopic potential is complemented with a tanatus striving, which is historically interwoven in complicated construction and balances. This means that human and feminist liberation is not determined as all positive utopists thought, and it implies that sometimes the distorted human dialogue or discourse might be seen as liberation and realization of the utopian imperative. It also implies that within the systems involved, it is impossible to determine or differentiate between a discourse and a dialogue, human perversion or human liberation. In saying this, I do not imply relativism, defeatism, and one-dimensional pessimism, but pessimistic utopianism.

     According to this theory, the female essence is evolving historically in certain natural and human conditions that are to be reconstructed, criticized, evaluated, and changed. However, this is only from outside the system, or as a transcendental dialectical deconstruction of it. The transcendental moment in the critical theory I suggest should be imbedded in an immanent critique, and its parameters, ideals, and goals should spring from the tradition of Objective Reason in its critical-humanistic orientation. The transcendental dimension should not replace the immanent, historical concreteness  of this critical dialogue and political praxis. That is why the Utopian moment is so vital for such a critique or for such a deconstruction, since the potential and the “otherness” of “the given” situation is a precondition for a theoretical and political stand such as the one that I offer here.

     The historic-ontological conception I suggest here is very different from those radical feminist essentialists and their conception of the unbridgeable gap between men and women.(57)  It also differs strongly from those postmodernist feminists and their ideology of playing with construction and deconstruction of identities and the contingent transfer from the one to another,(58) to the point where there is no room for any certain identity at all.

     Immanently, while not objectively, it is possible to reconstruct the historical conditions of a universal pragmatic that better suits the dialogue in which human essence and its potentialities will be better realized. These more human conditions are tested by the opportunities for developing the potentialities and the self-identity of women. However, in principle and in reality there are historical stages in which, given  the current horizons of a particular system, there is no scope for more than one possibility for realizing women’s essence or its distortion/perversion. In the current development in the Israeli system, within the framework of the present realm of self-evidence, the only open possibility is deconstruction of women’s essence with no Utopian connected Aufhebung, but with reproduction of the new mode disconnected from a foundation, essence, or goal. Postmodern discourse in the Israeli system is striving there, and the postmodern condition in the Israeli system makes the only rational way for the Israeli system.

     Critical humanism rejects these dimensions of postmodernism and refuses the total deconstruction of  women’s essence and the parts of the dialogue which concern their historical production, local and diverse representations, distribution, and consumption - in light of their symbolic and material social context. The position suggested here demands that the female essence less passively represent current fashions and hegemonic dynamics and be more actively involved in the shaping of present reality. This moral imperative is ontologically derived from the concept of the dialogical existence of humanity in the world, as part of a concrete utopian obligation. This obligation is to the creation of new and more human modes of coexistence between men and women, between the historical moment and its utopian axis. Marx saw in men and women realizing non-repressive sexual relations the ultimate criterion for communism and the overcoming of the domination urge.(59)  The liberation, realization, and development of potentialities that are invested in women’s essence as anti-culture and the feminization of men are some of the central conditions for the Utopian fulfillment, namely life as art and the eroticization of world life, in Marcuse’s thought.(60)

     Here the issue at stake is the concrete social-cultural possibilities for such a change, its foundations, its telos, or the very possibility of having a non-contingent criterion for criticizing and evaluating the present. In each system a circular process necessarily reaffirms and reproduces the local manifestations of the realm of self-evidence, reproducing itself, its basic power relations, and its vital symbolic interactions. This is so since this is exactly what a system is for. In the present realm of self-evidence that the Israeli system reflects, the feminist movement is but a fragment of this existence, and challenging it is supposed to be the central element of feminism. Politically and theoretically, the question is raised as to what are the grounds for the demand for a liberation that is nothing but a new version of the same patriarchal, domination- oriented space that feminism is to transform or replace. Woman was traditionally the “other” but not “the totally other” of the present culture and its realizations. “The totally other” remained transcendent and Utopian, and in its Objective Reason tradition, Western culture included the potential political possibility of negating the present and its treachery in the name of “the totally other”. In the new realm of self-evidence being constructed in our time, where there is no place for objective, transcendentalist, and universalistic concepts and criteria, and where there is no place for the Enlightenment’s central concepts and radical speculative social critique, what might be the foundation, or at least the direction, for a humanistic feminist alternative?

     The new, post-modern realm of self-evidence is not yet complete, and is therefore not yet completely closed. This is manifested by the relative openness of its systems, as they include vivid elements of the previous, modern realm of self-evidence. That is one of the reasons why in current Western culture, there are still revolutionary potentials that are relatively protected from daily power relations, as manifested in the soul and in tradition. Saying this does not amount to the claim that these germs are not  a social-cultural construct that was historically developed. Given that in being, space and time merge, the argument made here is that the ontological dimension can be revealed only within the framework of historical horizons and concrete and diverse social contexts.

     Three examples are suggested here to elaborate the critical potential still existing within the framework of the Enlightenment’s humanist tradition. The first is connected to reason being the essential element of language and public discourse turning into a dialogue, as Habermas introduces it (61) in terms of Western democracies. The second is connected to the permanence of Western tradition, as various neo-conservatives understand it, from Ellen Bloom and David Hirsh to bourgeois liberal postmodernists like Richard Rorty. Finally, there is the uneasiness and the feeling of emptiness and alarm and fear that accompany current civilization’s existence.

     The permanence of the current realm of self-evidence reflects violent logic of traditional paternalism. It ensures the conditions for the fixation of women in space where, while being repressed, they protect their oppositional essence from the power relations, saving the potential and the ideal of a less repressive alternative, a more just and more human reality where love and solidarity are recognized and are accorded the proper place in the public sphere. Historically, it has to be said, the permanence of women’s essence has exacted the price of even more efficient repression. In Western societies this is changing at the end of the twentieth century.

     During this century, technological progress, the instrumentalization of  knowledge, and the conceptual transformation have created major changes in local systems. This transformation of systems reflects the destruction of the modern realm of self-evidence. It facilitates the illusion of strong liberation or progress. For the first time in the history of Western societies, a real challenge to women’s essence and her human liberation potential has emerged. Within these conditions, new opportunities are opening for adjustment and integration in the main power struggles for women from the hegemonic groups. This is conditioned at the cost of their masculinization,  that is, their functioning as “strong” and “successful” women. The essence of their masculinization is revealed in the term “muscle”, which builds the masculine concept at the base of the only permitted way of life of the new woman. In positive Utopianism, there were visions of a synthesis between the “pleasure principle” and the “reality principle”, a synthesis that Herbert Marcuse called “a new reality principle”. Within this Utopia, humanity was to overcome the historical estrangement between culture and nature, the ought and the must, between male and female essences. In our time, it looks as if in the hegemony groups of Western societies a reality is being constructed, one very similar to the Marxian Utopia of abolition of work and the Marcusian Utopian vision in which “the new reality principle” is realized. The annihilation of estrangement between essential female and male characteristics is not connected at all with the utopian synthesis; it is connected to the total collapse of the one and the all-penetrating power of the other. The masculine-domination logic is that of conquering the feminist alternative. This is but a reflection of the ways in which the absence of the utopian quest is manifested. In the absence of a Utopian axis and of a conceptual, and therefore also social-cultural, foundation, the very possibility of radical critique and democracy is being destroyed. What is conceived as the admirable liberation of women and  successful entrance to the real power spaces is but a reflection of this evolution, which is just beginning. The feminization of the teaching profession is part of this evolution. Let us return to the Israeli system.

     From an uncritical point of view, there is room for hope that the feminization of the teaching profession in Israel will contribute to social progress and will even contribute to the humanization of life at school and result in the reduction of aggressive aspects of schooling. From this point of view, there is also hope that women’s “voice”(62) will create in the much more feminist school arena a space for freer and more emancipatory development. Such a development should favor universal free evaluation and creation of knowledge, more of a dialogue, and better human relations at school. Such is the utopian vision of that kind of feminist pedagogy, that current historical conditions enable the struggle for its realization.(63)  However, ontological conditions and historical developments create a fatal change in the stand of knowledge and invested potentialities in and around the practices and institutions of its production and distribution. It is naive and misleading to try to realize the nineteenth-century Utopian model in the context of present knowledge and in cultural conditions that sterilize the emancipatory potential of those utopias. Basically, these pedagogical utopias are sectorially-oriented, and local, and not only anti-intellectual and anti-liberal but even anti-libertarian.

     One might have hoped that in Israel this process would give women the power that it has given feminists in some parts of the Western world, and would provide a new opportunity for feminist self-emancipation as part of a more general civic activism. Teachers as educators in Israeli schools could have been agents for real change, and the teaching profession could have become a counter-power focus politically, morally, aesthetically, and philosophically.

     Yet these developments did not occur in Israel. At the present historical stage, such hopes of supporting women’s liberation by using such potentialities of current power relations are doomed to fail. This is because the dehumanization process of society, which manifests itself through the all-penetrating logic of the market in the educational arena, the curriculum, the pedagogic practices and school administration, is a process that by the same token has to demolish women’s “voice” and essence. It should be acknowledged that the feminization of the teaching profession in Israel does not promise liberation, but advanced manipulation under the logic of the Domination Principle. In the end, the common ground for major developments in women’s mobility within the Israeli system is the strengthening of existing dynamics and the Domination Principle.

     The struggle for advancing towards an “ideal speech situation”, about which Habermas speaks, includes the struggle for the formation of conditions and the challenging of threats and distortions of such a speech situation. As the major developments and central conditions of feminization of teaching in Israel demonstrate, we currently face the historical banishment of potential Israeli counter-education: the banishment of conditions for teachers’ personality development as independent intellectual and social activists, with strong civic motivations and capacities, who educate and introduce possibilities of creating in school a kind of knowledge other than that introduced by the current Israeli culture industry. Today’s Israeli teachers all manifest the advancement of the production of civic impotence and political neutrality, not to mention weakness and pessimism. To the degree that they show some strength, it is in the form of  contrived optimism, manifesting the power to create truths, meanings, and collective consciousness. Namely, they manifest the powers and they act more or less effectively as repression agents in the service of the Israeli system. This is the same system that manipulates teachers and creates their false consciousness. Eventually, this is only one of the means by which the system reproduces itself. One of the manifestations of its strengths is to be seen in the teachers at schools, who have no interest even in this thesis, or any other thesis that refers to the essence of the change of knowledge and the current stand of teachers in Israeli society.
 

Notes

(1)  Simon Leon, Hebrew Education in Palestine, London: The Zionist 1916, p. 1.

(2)   A. Ne’mann, “Hesegim vehasagot”, Sefer Hayovel Shel Histadrut Hamorim, Tel Aviv (1902) 1955, p.
227, in: Ada Lumski-Feder and Reuven Kahane, Dyucano Shel Hamore Bahevra Hayisraelit, Jerusalem: Akademon 1988, p. 1. (Hebrew).

(3) Ibid., p. 3.

(4) Ibid.

(5) Simon Leon, Ibid. p. 1.

(6) Simon Leon, Ibid., p. 12.

(7) Ernst Simon, Hamashber Batzionut Vehachinuch, Jerusalem: Katon 1947, p. 36 (Hebrew).

(8) Uri Ram, “Zionist historiography and the invention of modern Jewish nationhood: The case of Ben Zion Dinur”, History and Memory 7: 1 (1995), p. 93.

(9) Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, “Hama’avak al hashem - al yizuro shel hasubyekt hatziony besifere hageografia vehamoledet”, Davar, 18.3.1994, p. 24 (Hebrew).

(10) Plato, Protagoras, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1976.

(11) Rachel Alboim-Dror, “Nashim bautopiot hatzioniot”, Kathedra, 66 (1990), p. 108 (Hebrew).

(12) Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish; The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan, New York: Pantheon Books 1977.

(13) Francis Bacon, “Nouvum Organum”, in: The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, London: Routledge 1905, p. 259.

(14) Ibid.

(15) Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, The Education of the Human Race, translated by F. M. Robinson, London: Anthroposophical Pub. C. 1927.

(16)  Imanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Poitics, History, and Morals, translated by Ted Humphrey, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Bobbs-Merril Co. 1983.

(17) Wilhelm von Humbolt, “Theorie der Bildung des Menschen”, in: Gesammelte Schriften, I., Berlin 1968, p. 285.

(18) Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, New York: Oxford University Press 1974, p. 6.

(19) Ben Zion Dinur, Arachim Uderachim - Beayot Chinuch Vetarbut BeIsrael, Tel Aviv: Utim 1958, p. 11-21 (Hebrew).

(20) Juergen Habermas, “The public sphere”, in: Steven Seidman (ed.), Juergen Habermas on Society and Politics, Boston: Beacon Press 1989, p. 236.

(21) P. Bourdie and J. C. Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, translated by R. Nice, London: Sage 1977, pp. 1-68.

(22) Moshe Lifschitz, Toldot am Israel Badorot H’aharonim, I., Tel Aviv: Or Am 1985, pp. 60-72 (Hebrew).

(23) Shlomo Horowitz, Kitzur Toldot Israel Ba’et Ha’hadasha, II., Haifa: Beit Hasefer Harealy 1977, p. 157 (Hebrew).

(24) Ziegfrid Lehmann, Ra’aion Vehagshama, Tel Aviv 1962, p. 98 (Hebrew).

(25) Ada Lumski-Feder and Reuven Kahane, Dyukano Shel Hamore Bachevera HaIsraelit, pp. 1c, 16c (Hebrew).

(26) Ah’aron Bar-Adon, “Aa’imaot hameisdott’ umenat helkan batehia ha’iverit behithavuta (1882-1914), in: Lashon Veivrit, 3, (May 1990), p. 8, (Hebrew).

(27) Alboim-Dror, Op. Cit., p. 112.

(28) Gur-Ze’ev, Op. Cit., p. 24.

(29) Lumski-Feder and Kahane, Ibid., p. 1c.

(30) Yonathan Shapira, Ilit Lelo Mamshichim, Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim 1984, p. 66 (Hebrew).

(31) Ibid., p. 68.

(32) Ibid., p. 29.

(33) Ibid.

(34) Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, Boston: Beacon Press 1955, p. 129.

(35) Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, translated by John Riviere, London: The Hograth Press 1968 p. 40.

(36) J. Donovan, Feminist Theory, New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co. 1991, p. 125.

(37) A. Wellmer, “Reason, Utopia, and Enlightenment”, in: Richard Bernstein (ed.), Habermas and Modernity, Massachusetts: MIT Press 1985.

(38) Jean Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by F. Jamson, Manchester: Manchester University Press 1984, p. 47.

(39) Halishka Hamercazit Lestatistika, Statistical Abstract of Israel, 1994 (Hebrew).

(40) D. Rabinovitz, “Maskilim o defukim”, Haaretz, (2.8.1995), p. 1b.

(41) Majid Al-Haj, Education, Empowerment, and Control: The Case of The Arabs in Israel, Albany: State University of New York Press 1995.

(42)  The data were collected with the help of Dr. Nimer Ismair, a colleague and a friend to whom I am indebted.

(43)  Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, “The vocation of higher educatioin: modern and postmodern rhetorics in the Israeli academia on strike”, Journal of Thought 32: 2 (Summer 1997), pp. 75-84.

(44) Feige and Rudinger, “Tarbut hafreier vehazeut hayisraelit”, Alpayim: A Multidisciplinary Publication for Contemporary Thought and Literature, 7 (1993), pp. 118-136 (Hebrew).

(45) Theodor Adorno, Prisms, Translated by Samuel and Shirry Weber, Massachusetts: MIT Press 1981, p. 34.

(46) Alan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960-1990, New York: Simon and Schuster 1990, p. 369.

(47) Henry Giroux, Teachers as Intellectuals, New York: Bergin and Gravey 1988, p. 123.

(48) Ibid., p. 125-128.

(49) Michel Apple, Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1982.

(50)  Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, New York: Harper and Row 1971.

(51)  Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction, London: Unwin Hyman 1989, p. 224.

(52) Lyotard, Op. Cit.

(53) Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John Cumming, New York: Herder and Herder 1972, p. 248.

(54) Herbert Marcuse, Negations; Essays in Critical Theory, Translated by Jeremy Shapiro, Boston: Beacon Press 1968, p. 74.

(55) Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, New Jersey: Princeton Press, p. 32.

(56) Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, The Frankfurt School and the History of Pessimism, Jerusalem: Magness Press 1996 (Hebrew).

(57) Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Women and Rape, New York: Simon and Schuster 1975. See also:  Shulamith Firstone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, London: J. Cape 1971.

(58) William Tierney, Building Communities of Difference: Higher Education in the Twenty-first Century,
Westport, Conn: Bergin and Garvey 1993.

(59)  Karl Marx, Early Texts, Translated by David Mclelian, Oxford: Blackwell 1971.

(60) Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization; Op. Cit.

(61) Juergen Habermas, Der Philosophiche Diskurs der Moderne, Frankfurt a.M., 1989, p. 433.

(62) Caroll Gilligan, In Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press 1982.

(63) S. Ruth, Issues in Feminism; An Introduction to Women’s Studies, London and Toronto 1995, p. 15.