Content area
Full Text
Focus on Education in Times of Conflict: The Arab Image in Hebrew School Textbooks
Daniel Bar-Tal is professor of social psychology at the School of Education, Tel Aviv University. He served as the president of the International Society of Political Psychology.
His work focuses on the psychological foundations of intractable conflicts. The present article is a summary of one chapter in a book he co-authors with Professor Yona Teichman about Arabs' stereotype and prejudice in Israeli society, and will be published in 2002.
This article examines the representation of Arabs in Israeli Jewish education. Specifically, it reviews studies on the curriculum in textbooks used in the elementary and secondary Israeli Jewish schools, pointing out the changes that took place in different periods. This review is important because school textbooks provide an illustration of the shared societal beliefs, especially in democratic societies. That is, they constitute formal expressions of a society's ideology and ethos, its values, goals, and myths (Apple, 1979; Bourdieu, 1973; Luke, 1988). The above implies that school textbooks do not provide neutral knowledge, but rather construct a particular societal reality, particularly in language, literature, history, geography, religious studies, civic studies and social sciences. The selection of the "knowledge" to be included in the textbooks is a political process, and subject in some states to official approval.
The knowledge imparted through textbooks is usually presented and perceived as objective, truthful and factual. Down (1988), from the Council for Basic Education in the U.S.A., stated these ideas very directly: "Textbooks, for better or for worse, dominate what students learn. They set the curriculum, and often the facts learned, in most subjects. For many students, textbooks are their first and sometimes only early exposure to books and to reading. The public regards textbooks as authoritative, accurate, and necessary. And teachers rely on them to organize lessons and structure subject matters" (p. viii).
I, therefore, assume that in the hundred years of the Arab-Israel conflict, textbooks played an important role in shaping attitudes towards Arabs of Jews and Israelis educated in Hebrew schools in Palestine and, later, in Israel. The first school textbooks for the children of the Jewish immigrants in Palestine were written abroad by Zionists, and only from the early 1900s were the books written...