Hegemony and Common Sense in Israeli Public Education

• In Event: Roundtable Session 11
  In Roundtable Session: The Sense of Education: Reexamining Michael Apple’s Use of Gramscian Theory in Education Research

Abstract

Even before the founding of Israel, myriad groups struggled over the collective perception of what and who is “Israeli.” So the struggle continues today. One of the central sites of this battle has been the Israeli public education system. Despite strong challenges and prominent reforms to public education over the years, it has continued to be shaped and controlled by essentially the same hegemonic alliance since 1948: secular Western-oriented Zionists and religious Western-oriented Zionists. Over the years, this hegemonic bloc, despite internal tensions, compromises, and shifts, has gained strength with the emergence of the new managerial state in the 1980s. Central to its power has been its production, preservation, and strategic transformation of the common sense perception of “what is Israeli”. The alliance has defended, promoted, and altered its vision in debates over curriculum, pedagogy, and access to public education. Traditionally (albeit not exclusively) excluded from this alliance have been Arab-Palestinian (mainly Muslim) Israelis and Jewish Israeli citizens whose families originated from Arab and Muslim countries.

I consider this system of inclusion and exclusion and describe how it is bound up with: inequalities in access to education; inequalities within schools (e.g. biases in curricula); and disparities in educational achievement. Taking a neo-Gramscian approach, I discuss how these inequalities have been maintained by the hegemonic alliance in the face of opposition from groups representing the excluded. The alliance has been able to maintain hegemony, I argue, by shaping the commonsense and adapting (though not radically) its vision of “Israeli” so as to include, mollify, or undercut opposing groups. Taking up Wong’s (2002) understanding of the possibility of different regimes using different (or multiple) hegemonizing strategies, I build out from Apple and show how the alliance in a single socio-political regime applies different strategies against different groups to maintain its control and counter opposition. I first present the special circumstances of Israel’s state formation, the tensions and compromises into which and from which it was born, and the hegemonic culture, ideology, and commonsense that has dominated Israeli society and identity and still guides its public education.

Author

• Assaf Meshulam, Ben Gurion University of the Negev