Education System`s Developments in Israel

The course deals with the ideological and bureaucratic borderlines that govern the Israeli national education system and their link with the field of art education. In this context we will discuss the historical, cultural, economic and political circumstances that have influenced the formation of the education system, its changing goals and the ways in which the system has sought to respond to various educational challenges by formulating new pedagogical, literacy and administrative conceptions. While examining the changing character of Israel’s education policy we will discuss the major theoretical axes that have shaped the system and the field of art education, as well those that have been excluded from it. We will also discuss the changing social and cultural role played by formal education and the diverse practices it has adopted. The discussion of these issues will be conducted around texts originally written by those who conceived of the reforms and who shaped the policy, empirical texts that examined their “on the ground” implementation, texts that read the educational reality from a critical point of view, and cinematic-documentary texts that explore the subject through the lens of personal memory.