Epilogue

While working on this book at a library in Tel Aviv University, a librarian asked me to sum up my research in one sentence and remarked that knowing how to do it was essential to all researchers. Giving her a definite answer was a challenging task then and it remains so now while summing up this book. Initially, it is a book about the Mandate period, but while writing the history of education, the late Ottoman period appears not only as background but as the essential foundations of the postwar reality. This was not confined to the educators that filled the ranks of Arab and Hebrew educational administration during the Mandate. The institutionalization of educational segregation and inability or reluctance to challenge it started before the first British soldier set foot in Palestine. This is a book about the British colonial project in Palestine and its grave repercussions in the field of education for its native population. The colonial Department advocated a policy of educational restraint, articulated in a history syllabus that sought to cleanse history itself from collective lessons, national ethos, and political agency. But the colonial angle tells only a partial story because this policy was met with a growing community of Palestinian educators and students who (naturally) found in the past a space in which they could ask questions about the present, and events or people that served as inspiration and possible models for the future....