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Citizenship Education in Israel in the Eyes of Young Adults

Citizenship
Democracy
Education
Political Activism
Activism
Mohammad Massalha
Open University of Israel
Gal Levy
Open University of Israel
Mohammad Massalha
Open University of Israel

Abstract

What citizenship education ought to be or does? We seek to add to this debate a forgotten perspective, that of young citizens. By and large, the extant scholarship and research follows one of two main strands: the one focuses mostly on the civics curriculum asking what is the knowledge that citizenship education transmits; the other inquires what kinds of citizens it seeks to form. Either way, the predominant approach is looking at CE through the official civics textbooks and curriculum and the assumed intentions of educational policymakers. Yet, rarely has this research examined how CE is received by young Israelis who experience their first years as citizens. Hence, we ask what do graduates of the Israeli education system take and internalize from their experience of studying citizenship in high school. To probe this question, we investigate the reception of CE by two cohorts of young citizens: recent high school graduates (19-21 years-old), and young activists from various social backgrounds. By focusing on young adults we propose to make two contributions. Empirically, bringing to the fore the voice of young adults may teach us better about its longer term impact on their lives as citizens. Theoretically, CE studies, we believe, are trapped in an ideological impasse, torn by the tension between CE's universalistic and particularistic poles and by its exclusive focus on the terms of inclusion in the citizenry. Preliminary findings allow us to draw three tentative conclusions: Israeli schools in general fail to imbue the notion of citizenship with real meaning, and consequently, while Palestinian-Arab young adults face a gap between what they were taught and the discriminatory reality they encounter, Jewish adults do not distinguish their citizenship status from their national identity, reinforcing an empty meaning of citizenship.