Teacher Education Policy and Practice in Israel From the Perspective of Those Outside the “Common Good”

This chapter deals with teacher education policy and practices in Israel. It includes an in-depth analysis of the implications of teacher education policy and practice for the construction of the selective “common good” in Israeli society, with a special emphasis on the community most explicitly excluded from this construction, the Palestinian Arab minority.

In many societies, the “common good” is defined in terms of its dominant group and is used to protect and expand its dominance. This is the case in Israel, which is officially defined as “The State of the Jewish people,” despite the presence of an indigenous Palestinian Arab minority that comprises 20% of the total population. Ideally, the educational system should reflect the society’s heterogeneous demographics through multicultural aims and goals and culture-specific curricula. Yet, an examination of Israel’s public educational system reveals a definite bias toward Western, European (Ashkenazi) culture to the disadvantage and marginalization of Jews from non-Western cultures and the Palestinian Arab minority.

I argue that under the hegemonic, monocultural discourse that determines education policy in Israel, teacher education and practice have served the state’s mechanisms for controlling subordinate groups, rather than providing teachers with adequate and appropriate tools for addressing the complex cultural and political reality, and questions of national identity, social justice, inclusion/exclusion, and equity.