Civics 101 for Israel

The Van Leer Institute’s Naftali Rothenberg, who has created a textbook and study program for junior high schools, is hoping students will take a creative approach to the subject

By PEGGY CIDOR
Arachim V’ezrahim (Values and Citizens), the new civics textbook for junior high schools. (photo credit: Courtesy)
Arachim V’ezrahim (Values and Citizens), the new civics textbook for junior high schools.
(photo credit: Courtesy)
popular Hebrew song opens with the question “How is a song born?” It goes on to talk about the difficulties, the pain and the joy experienced, like giving birth to a child, until the song is ready to go its own way.
In some ways, Arachim V’ezrahim (Values and Citizens), the new civics textbook for junior high schools across the country had a similar story. Twenty years ago, the Van Leer Institute set up a group to study the value of democracy, peace and coexistence. The group was composed of all sectors of Israeli society – men and women, secular and religious, including haredim, representing most of the scope of the Israeli political map – to think together, work out some understandings and draft a proposal for an educational program that would suit the nation’s schools, including religious, immigrant and Arab students.
Over the years, in light of the enormous success it had in the schools, the program was turned into an official textbook, focusing on civics education, which is now required for matriculation. This year, Rabbi Prof. Naftali Rothenberg, the textbook’s editor and head of the team, which included prominent educators and scholars, gave the Education Ministry the results – a textbook for civics instruction for the country’s junior high schools. Civics studies include the state’s laws; discussions of democracy; the status of MKs, the prime minister and the president; the political system; and the rights and duties of Israeli citizens.
“I was rather against the whole idea at first,” admits Rothenberg in a conversation held recently at his office in the Van Leer Institute in Talbiyeh. “I thought we didn’t have the necessary pedagogical skills.
But the institute’s director, Prof. Gabriel Motzkin, thought it was the right thing to do and that it fit the institute’s aims, so I agreed to form and lead the team of scholars, and we began to work. I must admit I was surprised to see that our program [resulting from the team’s work] was welcomed and included in so many high schools.”
The team proposed a special model of teaching whereby students had to prepare the various themes included in the program.
“We didn’t want to put the teachers in the classical position of talking in front of the class. Rather, we wanted them to serve as says Rothenberg.
Students were required to be very active. They were asked to produce a newspaper and to organize debates. Studies were carried out in little groups with students teaching each other, while the teachers were the facilitators whose main task was to organize and enable the advancement of the studies.
The program, which was still not part of the official curriculum, became very popular. At some point, it was used in 450 schools across the country, including religious and Arab schools, some of them large institutions with 1,000 students or more. Special teams were formed by the teachers in the schools, and most of them included the program in their budget and paid the coordinators additional hours.
“At some point,” recalls Rothenberg, “the Education Ministry came to us and said that we had an excellent basis for a program that could be included in the official curriculum. They proposed that we focus on civics education and turn the program into an official and recognized textbook and study program for civics in high schools.”
The reactions among the Van Leer team were mixed. Rothenberg himself was against it, fearing that a successful program that had been accepted as a non-official study program might become “a very bad official textbook.”
He explained that no one on his team had any pedagogical experience in writing a textbook according to an official topic within the curriculum. But the decision to go for it was made, and some 10 years ago the Van Leer team was expanded with the addition of an expert in pedagogical methodology – an editor who took the team through a complete training process in pedagogy, all of which was supervised by Rothenberg. The result was a textbook that was suitable for high schools.
Rothenberg says that the ministry’s curriculum provides the guidelines that determine the book’s content. He adds that any issue that is at the base of any conversation that two or more Israelis might have – or rather avoid bringing up for fear of getting into a harsh debate – is in the book.
“All the topics we avoid if we don’t want to ruin a nice evening with friends or relatives are exactly those we had to deal with in a pedagogical way. We didn’t have the privilege of avoiding these issues. In fact, there was not one sole issue we didn’t tackle. We had to bring them all in and find ways to enable open debates and, on top of that, the original aim – studying,” he explains, giving as an example of a controversial topic whether Israel is more Jewish or more democratic.
In fact, says Rothenberg, some debates among the writers took days, and the whole process of writing was held up.
“The fact that we had Arab scholars on the team caused them to realize, whether they liked it or not, that Israel is a nation-state. That today they are a minority in the state in which they are citizens.
And the very secular among the team had to realize that the Zionist movement, which brought about the creation of the State of Israel, that this so-called secular movement established so firmly the connection between the Land of Israel and the State of Israel, that same officially secular Zionist movement has taken the tallit, that Jewish religious symbol, and turned it into the state’s flag, and so on.
It is demanding for both sides. Secular [Israelis] have to understand that the state symbol is a tallit and the menora, while a religious member of the team must realize that the state is a secular framework that also embraces the religious symbols of the Jewish people. That was not easy for anyone, but we managed to do it,” he says.
Asked to summarize the long years of research, writing and editing to reach this point of such a remarkable project, Rothenberg says that it has enabled the team, and anyone who reads the book, “to understand that the citizens of the State of Israel lack the basic vocabulary of a serious civil society.” •