Israeli history curriculum and the conservative - liberal pendulum

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-124
Author(s):  
Tsafrir Goldberg ◽  
David Gerwin
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
World History ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
History Curriculum ◽  
National Movement ◽  
New Policies ◽  
Analytic Stance

At sixty-four Israel is still a comparatively young nation state, just passing from the 'developing' to the 'developed' phase. It has had five different history curricula for the Jewish 'Mamlakhti' (public non-religious) and the Arab sectors, which account for the majority of the students. For the first five decades the history curriculum did not ignite much controversy. The first curriculum was a rallying curriculum centered on the Jewish national movement and the establishment of Israel. In 1975 an 'academized' curriculum incorporated historical thinking goals – a move away from just an identification stance and towards an analytic stance. The mandatory baccalaureate examination, however, pushed for memorization and coverage. The fourth curriculum in 1993 integrated Jewish and world history with a slightly greater emphasis on world history, covered Israel's first three wars, and historical Jewish Diasporas and ethnicities. One textbook in the late nineties included cases of the deportation of Palestinian civilians during Israel's independence war. The decade since the turn of the millennia has been turbulent and inconsistent. New 'heritage' projects sponsored by right-wing Ministers of Education have alternated with curriculum emphasizing critical thinking, interpretation and multiple sources. The pendulum swung from expressive populist ethnocentricity to critical inquiry and diversity and back. New policies are haphazardly and partially enforced until a rival coalition reaches power and 'debates' curricula by publicizing the attempts to undo or alter them. Little attention was given to the ways teachers or students actually enacted and perceived the curriculum.

scholarly journals Analysing documents and interpreting textbooks: Students' historical thinking skills in learning about the battle of Surabaya

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aditya Widiadi
Keyword(s):  
Critical Pedagogy ◽  
Secondary Students ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
History Teachers ◽  
History Curriculum

<p><b>This thesis examines how secondary students in Indonesia develop historical thinking skills through analysing documents and interpreting textbooks on a key historical event in Indonesia’s independence: the battle of Surabaya. Developing historical thinking skills poses a particular challenge in an Indonesian setting. Although history education has been largely aimed at fostering a spirit of nationalism and patriotism among younger people, the recent history curriculum (2013) requires teachers to foster historical thinking skills with their students. This poses a significant challenge for teachers who typically rely on lectures and textbooks with an official government perspective. Even those teachers who are motivated, have difficulties in accessing primary sources needed to stimulate students’ historical thinking. </b></p><p>There is a gap in the literature on historical thinking in Indonesia, and this research project contributes to how these challenges can be addressed. To examine how learning history through analysing documents and interpreting textbooks contribute to students’ historical thinking skills, this study was informed by the theoretical perspectives of critical pedagogy, cognitivism, threshold concepts, and connectivism. To collect and analyse the data, this study used a mixed methods intervention design. Participants in this study involved three history teachers from three different schools and 11th grade students (n = 191, age 16-19) that were divided into control and experimental groups. By using six data collection instruments, both quantitative and qualitative, this study conducted two phases of learning interventions. </p><p>Findings of this study show that analysing documents and interpreting textbooks (ADIT learning model) contributes to the development of students’ historical thinking skills. This was demonstrated by the experimental group who progressed better than those of the control group. However, both groups of students were challenged, especially when dealing with multiple sources and establishing their interpretative position. The findings of this study also show that the advancement of students’ historical thinking skills was closely related to students’ complex epistemic beliefs about history. Learning through analysing documents and interpreting textbooks, as well as using web-based historical sources, has proven to foster students’ historical thinking skills.</p>

scholarly journals Analysing documents and interpreting textbooks: Students' historical thinking skills in learning about the battle of Surabaya

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aditya Widiadi
Keyword(s):  
Critical Pedagogy ◽  
Secondary Students ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
History Teachers ◽  
History Curriculum

<p><b>This thesis examines how secondary students in Indonesia develop historical thinking skills through analysing documents and interpreting textbooks on a key historical event in Indonesia’s independence: the battle of Surabaya. Developing historical thinking skills poses a particular challenge in an Indonesian setting. Although history education has been largely aimed at fostering a spirit of nationalism and patriotism among younger people, the recent history curriculum (2013) requires teachers to foster historical thinking skills with their students. This poses a significant challenge for teachers who typically rely on lectures and textbooks with an official government perspective. Even those teachers who are motivated, have difficulties in accessing primary sources needed to stimulate students’ historical thinking. </b></p><p>There is a gap in the literature on historical thinking in Indonesia, and this research project contributes to how these challenges can be addressed. To examine how learning history through analysing documents and interpreting textbooks contribute to students’ historical thinking skills, this study was informed by the theoretical perspectives of critical pedagogy, cognitivism, threshold concepts, and connectivism. To collect and analyse the data, this study used a mixed methods intervention design. Participants in this study involved three history teachers from three different schools and 11th grade students (n = 191, age 16-19) that were divided into control and experimental groups. By using six data collection instruments, both quantitative and qualitative, this study conducted two phases of learning interventions. </p><p>Findings of this study show that analysing documents and interpreting textbooks (ADIT learning model) contributes to the development of students’ historical thinking skills. This was demonstrated by the experimental group who progressed better than those of the control group. However, both groups of students were challenged, especially when dealing with multiple sources and establishing their interpretative position. The findings of this study also show that the advancement of students’ historical thinking skills was closely related to students’ complex epistemic beliefs about history. Learning through analysing documents and interpreting textbooks, as well as using web-based historical sources, has proven to foster students’ historical thinking skills.</p>

Constitutionalizing Sophisticated Racism: Israel's Proposed Nationality Law

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 40-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amal Jamal
Keyword(s):  
External Factors ◽  
Radical Right ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Internal And External Factors ◽  
Nationality Law

This essay analyzes the political motivations behind the Jewish Nation-State Bill introduced in the Knesset in November 2014, shedding light on the ascendancy of the Israeli political establishment's radical right wing. It argues that there were both internal and external factors at work and that it is only by examining these thoroughly that the magnitude of the racist agenda currently being promoted can be grasped. The essay also discusses the proposed legislation's long history and the implications of this effort to constitutionalize what amounts to majoritarian despotism in present-day Israel.

Hegel's Antiquity

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will D. Desmond
Keyword(s):  
World History ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Classical World ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
Greek World

Hegel’s Antiquity aims to summarize, contextualize, and criticize Hegel’s understanding and treatment of major aspects of the classical world, approaching each of the major areas of his historical thinking in turn: politics, art, religion, philosophy, and history itself. The discussion excerpts relevant details from a range of Hegel’s works, with an eye both to the ancient sources with which he worked, and the contemporary theories (German aesthetic theory, Romanticism, Kantianism, Idealism (including Hegel’s own), and emerging historicism) which coloured his readings. What emerges is that Hegel’s interest in both Greek and Roman antiquity was profound and is essential for his philosophy, arguably providing the most important components of his vision of world history: Hegel is generally understood as a thinker of modernity (in various senses), but his modernity can only be understood in essential relation to its predecessor and ‘others’, notably the Greek world and Roman world whose essential ‘spirit’ he assimilates to his own notion of Geist.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Dmitry Shumsky
Keyword(s):  
State Solution ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
National State ◽  
National Group ◽  
National Movement ◽  
Left Base ◽  
The Way

This introductory chapter discusses the unquestioned identification between “Zionism” as a national movement that sought to realize the Jewish nation's self-determination in Palestine, and “the Jewish nation-state,” which has no room for the national collective existence of any particular national group other than the Jews and which represents the ultimate and teleological realization of the Zionist project. The vast majority of those who support the two-state solution, who are known as the “Zionist left,” base their position on the need to avoid the formation of a binational state in which the Jewish demographic majority would be endangered. They argue that this is the way to rescue what they consider to be the political core of the Zionist idea: a mono-national state for the Jewish political collective.

scholarly journals The Sphere of Critical Thinking in a Post-Epistemic World

1994 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Fuller
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
The State ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Big Science ◽  
The Public ◽  
Critical Attitude

Just as political theorists have long argued that democracy is viable only in communities of certain sizes and shapes, perhaps epistemologists should also entertain the idea that knowledge is possible only within certain social parameters-ones which today's world may have exceeded. This is what I mean by the "postepistemic" society. I understand an "epistemic society" in Popperian terms as an environment that fosters the spirit of conjectures and refutations. After castigating analytic philosophers for their failure to see this point, I show how Rousseau and Feyerabend occupy analogous positions as critics of, respectively, the nation-state and Big Science. Rather than endorsing the disestablishment of the state, however, I offer a proposal for reinjecting the critical attitude into Big Science. It involves heightening the sporting character of scientific disputes, perhaps even to the point of enabling the public to bet on their outcomes.

scholarly journals THE POLITICS OF REGIONALISM AND FEDERATION IN EAST AFRICA, 1958–1964

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 519-540 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRIS VAUGHAN
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
World History ◽  
Nation State ◽  
National Politics ◽  
East African ◽  
National Interests ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Definition Of

AbstractRecent scholarship discussing the ‘federal moment’ in world history after 1945 has re-examined alternatives to the nation-state in the years of decolonization, arguing against any inevitable transition from empire to nation. This article focuses on the case of East Africa, where federation seemed an attractive and likely prospect by 1963, yet never came to pass. Here, the politics of federation should be understood as a constitutive part of the contested nation-state-making process, rather than a viable alternative to it. For the leaders who initiated the politics of federation in the 1960s, regional unity promised the further centralization of power and a means of defeating ‘tribalist’ opposition. For their opponents, federation was seized on as a means of promoting the autonomy of provinces or kingdoms within a larger federal unit. Ultimately, regionalist aspiration was inseparable from national politics, and negotiations among the leaders of East African states demanded the definition of national interests which divided states rather than united them. Such conclusions suggest that historians of the federal moment might more productively focus on the functions of federalist discourse in the making of nation-states rather than debating the viability of federalist projects.

Teaching A Geographical Component In World History Curriculum

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (12) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Olga A. Kachina
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
No Child Left Behind ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
World History ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
History Curriculum ◽  
Analytical Thinking ◽  
Short Period ◽  
The World ◽  
Foreign Policies

This article is devoted to the topic of teaching a geographical component in World History curriculum in American public high schools. Despite the fact that the federal legislation entitled No Child Left Behind (2001) declared geography as a "core" academic subject, geography was the only subject dropped from federal funding. As a result, geography as a separate subject in the majority of public schools around the country ceased to exist. California, New Mexico, and Rhode Island have adopted state standards of combined course of World History and Geography. However, a small geography segment included within the World History course has not been sufficient to provide students with a satisfactory level of geographical literacy. American students show their lack of geographical knowledge in one study after another even though the 21st century is an era of globalization and increasing international relationship. The geopolitical approach to teaching the World History course promoted in this paper can improve the situation significantly in a relatively short period of time. This geopolitical approach stresses the connection between history and geography. It involves an analysis of a countys economy, culture, domestic and foreign policies as directly connected to its geography. This approach improves students analytical thinking and conceptual understanding.

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