ABSTRACT
Little children experience themselves and others through the family arrangements into which they are born. Kinship and familism come to be the natural ordering of things, and fill the metaphor of family with so much feeling. Only later is the child made to realize that parental authority is itself subordinate to a broader social order; and that on numerous occasions loyalty to the collectivity transcends that of familial ties. Many of the holidays celebrated in kindergartens index what Firer (1985), basing her research on school history texts, calls the Law of Zionist Redemption. The kindergarten is defined as the child’s world, and the only adult who has a legitimate place within it is the teacher the representative of the national collectivity. More implicitly, hidden agendas of these scenarios unearth the more problematic relationship between state and family. The kindergarten is the first location where children learn of hierarchy and egality outside the home.
