Name : Bodhinanda Chandra

University : Kyushu University

Country Assignment : Israel
Regional Bloc : Asia
Meeting Room : #2
Priority #2 : Improve the Quality of Learning
Committee : Learning Materials
1. Introduction

Israel is a country in Western Asia, which is located on the south-eastern shore of the
Mediterranean Sea, between Egypt and Lebanon. It has around 8 million population which ethnic
consist of almost 75% Jewish and 20% Arab (Central Intelligence Agency, 2014). The World
Happiness Report 2013 published by United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions
Network revealed that Israeli live in a happy and sufficient condition. Israel is listed on rank 11
th
,
with 7.301 point, out of 156 countries, while United States is on rank 17
th
and Japan is on
number 43 (Helliwell, Layard, & Sachs, 2013).
Related to education, about 5.6% of Israels Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is used for
educational purposes on 2011, which is around 13.6 billion USD from total 242.9 billion USD,
and approximately 97.1% of its total population is literate, which is the highest among the
Middle East countries (Central Intelligence Agency, 2014). In 2012, Israel was named the second
most educated country in the world according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development's Education at a Glance report. The report found that 78% of the money invested in
education is from public funds and 45% of the population has a university or college degree
(Haaretz, 2012).
Education in Israel is believed as a precious legacy which contains a lot of values from
tradition of the past generations. The main purpose of the countrys educational system is to
prepare children to become responsible members of a democratic and pluralistic society in which
people from different ethnic, religious, cultural and political backgrounds coexist (Israel Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, 2010). In order to achieve this goal, improvement and maintenance in the
quality of learning especially by having sufficient number and appropriate quality of learning
materials is fundamental.
2. Issue: Learning Materials

Demands of Teaching Materials
Shortly after the State of Israel was founded on 1948, the education system has faced the
enormous challenge of integrating large numbers of immigrant children from over 70 countries.
The mass immigration which was started from the beginning of 1950s, mainly from postwar
Europe, Arab countries, and was succeeded in the 1960s by a large influx of Jews from North
Africa. Since 1970s to 1990s, a large number of Jews from former Soviet Union and almost the
entire Jewish community of Ethiopia have also come to Israel. This huge number of migration
has caused urgent demands for more classrooms, teachers, teaching materials, as well as special
tools and methods to help absorb youngsters from many cultural backgrounds into the school
population (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2010).
In order to overcome this problem, on early 1990s, the local government increased the
national expenditure on education to around 10% of their GDP, roughly 5 billion USD of total
52.5 billion USD (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2010). Several education policies and
programs were designed specifically to meet the needs of the newcomers, including the
preparation of appropriate curricular aids and short-term classes which purpose is to introduce
immigrant pupils to subjects that had not been learned in their countries of origin, such as the
Hebrew language and Jewish history. The Ministry of Education was also involved in an
ongoing process of bringing educational standards in line with modern pedagogic practices, such
as mandating gender equality, upgrading teacher status, broadening humanistic curricula, and
promoting scientific and technological studies. Regarding to the improvement of learning
materials, the Ministry of Education also developed curricula and textbooks, and producing
programs for educational television. These programs were implemented gradually, beginning in
the 1991-1992 school year (Sprinzak, Segev, Bar, & Levi-Mazloum, 1996).
Viewing that education is important for the development of the nation, Israel has
increased their expenditure for education from 5 billion USD to more than 13 billion USD in
twenty years (1990-2011) (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2010). Moreover, since 2007,
Israel's Compulsory Education Law has also provided free and compulsory education for all
children between the ages of 5 to 18, started from the last year of kindergarten up to 12
th
grade of
secondary education, which was previously applied to pupils only until 10
th
grade (Kashti, 2007).
In short, Israel have fulfilled the demands of learning materials quantitatively and currently
improving the quality of the content of books or curriculum and advancing the media and
technology used.

Textbooks
In 2012, according to the Israeli Books Laws, the National Library of Israel registered at
least 8,176 new publications, including 7,487 books, 273 CDs and around 3,500 periodicals
(newspapers, local bulletins, journals, and weekly portion flyers) (The National Library of Israel,
2012). The number of new publication published is about 1,300 more than in 2011. For
comparison, in 2011 the National Library listed 6,876 new publications. 6,302 of these were
books of various kinds: government publications, commercial and private publications, research
studies, non-fiction, fiction, religious texts and children's books in various languages, genres and
styles. The number of books for children and youth has also increased from 660 in 2011 to 836
new books in 2012 (not counting 305 new textbooks), which by extend, about 11% of the total
number of new books in 2012 (The National Library of Israel, 2012). Although, the number of
textbook risen steadily over the past 5 years, there are still some issues, mostly about racism,
contents error, and censored contents issue, found from local textbook.

Racism in Textbook
An Israeli professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
Nurit Peled-Elhanan, in her book titled Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and
Propaganda in Education published in United Kingdom on June 2012, described that numerous
textbooks in Israel promote a negative image of Arabs and thereby categorized as a racism. With
academic analysis supported by examples, images, maps, use of language and illustrations,
Professor Peled-Elhanan, in her book, gives a whole new meaning to complaints about "teaching
children to hate" in the Middle East (Peled-Elhanan, 2012). Every year, there are a lot of Israels
young men and women are recruited into obligatory military service and are required to engage
directly in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Professor Peled-Elhanan mainly asked and questioned,
how does Israels education system prepare and shape its young people to view, think and act
regarding that conflict. Similar thought also proposed before by Dan Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv
University who studied 124 textbooks used in Israeli schools. In his 2004 article titled "The Arab
Image in Hebrew School Textbooks", he also concluded that generations of Israeli Jews have
been taught a negative and often delegitimizing view of Arabs at school. He claimed Arabs are
portrayed in these textbooks as primitive, inferior in comparison to Jews, violent, untrustworthy,
fanatic, treacherous and aggressive. While history books in the elementary schools hardly
mentioned Arabs, the high school textbooks that covered the ArabJewish conflict, stereotyped
Arabs negatively, as intransigent and uncompromising (Traubman, 2004).
The Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, now known as the Institute for
Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, a schoolbook monitoring
organization, disputed this finding, calling their claim heavily politicized and distorted. The
organization criticized Peled-Elhanan's paper, "The Presentation of Palestinians in Israeli
Schoolbooks of History and Geography 1998-2003", which was based on seven schoolbooks, for
being "highly selective in its use of source material, leaving out all references which contradict
to the thesis," "a deliberate misinterpretation of facts" and "inaccurate, distorted, and even
downright based on false evidence (Groiss, 2006)." The organization also said that there are no
indoctrination against the Arabs as a nation, nor a negative presentation of Islam. Islam, Arab
culture and the Arabs' contribution to human civilization were presented in a positive manner.
No book called for violence or war and many books express the yearning for peace between
Israel and the Arab countries.

Content Error in Arabic Textbooks
On the other hand, an examination of many textbooks used in Arab schools reveals
concerning information about mistakes in language, syntax and grammar. Based on a
comprehensive study of the language and contents in third grade through ninth grade textbooks
by the Arab Cultural Association, it emerges that there are at least 16,255 mistakes, including
7,532 mistakes in math books, 3,939 mistakes in geography and history, and hundreds in Arabic
language (Khoury, 2011). Researchers also spoke about the contents of the textbooks and the
way they deal with Arab students' cultural and national identities. For example, it is stated that
Jews and non-Jews live in the Galilee but the word "Arab" is never mentioned.
Answering these complaints, the Education Ministry said the Arab education division and
the textbook approval division at the ministry would further examine all the reported textbooks
intended for the Arab sector (Khoury, 2011). They also noted that all textbooks approved for the
sector had undergone a professional pedagogic assessment but they had not been checked for
language under the ministry's auspices. Similar problems of more than 4,000 mistakes in
language and syntax actually have been reported before in November 2009, however, the
association said that the ministry only disqualified the books without introducing any systematic
changes to them, and did not bother to re-examine the books intended for the other grades
(Khoury, 2011). A new procedure of author certification regarding the precision of language
used in the book has been sent to all of the books' authors and therefore hopefully will reduce the
contents mistake from the next published textbooks.

Censored Human Reproduction Chapter in Biology Textbooks
In 2012, the Education Ministry has asked textbook publishers to remove chapters related
to human reproduction, pregnancy prevention and sexually transmitted diseases from science
textbooks which are used in state religious junior high schools as well as from their teacher
manuals (Datte & Skop, 2013). Chapters on human reproduction dont accord with state
religious school systems educational doctrine for junior high schools, says Education Ministry.
This change also will be the first distinction of science textbooks used in religious and secular
schools. Furthermore, removing the chapter on reproduction means that the religious students
will not learn anything about reproduction scientifically, unless they take biology in high school.
Every major textbook publisher in Israel confirmed the details of this report.
Chairwoman of Meretz Zahava Gal-On said in response to the report that the ministry's
decision "to censor 'damaging' topics from the curriculum in state-religious schools, such as the
human reproductive system or references to the female body, is not only ridiculous, but also
worrying." "More than 200,000 children today are in the state-religious education system, which
is 200,000 future citizens of the State of Israel who will grow up with ignorance and with the
sense that the human body, or to be more specific, the body of the woman, is something dirty,"
she said. Gal-On added that the education minister and everyone behind the 'terrible' decision
should understand that there is nothing embarrassing or damaging in descriptions of ovaries, "but
that the education system is something very shameful." (Datte & Skop, 2013)

Educational Television
Educational Television (ETV), a unit of the Ministry of Education that was established on
1965, produces and broadcasts scholastic programs for use in school classrooms and educational
programs for the entire population (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2010). The project of
teaching the new immigrants and the whole nations through television program was actually
initiated by agreement and support from UNESCO (Cassirer & Duckmanton, 1961). At the very
beginning, several programs were planned mostly about language, religion, economic and health
education. Besides, there were also programs like civic education, culture, news and international
knowledge to widen the Israeli comprehension and nationalism spirit.
They currently broadcasts around 215 hours of programs every week and collaborates
with education professionals at universities and teachers seminars in developing new teaching
methods. In the end of 2013, the channel rebranded as The Educational Channel, and now
focuses on their new children and educational programming schedule from 5 AM Israel Time, as
well as adult educational schedule from 8 PM Israel Time. In addition, the channel also has
recently started to upload its shows to their official YouTube channel before they broadcast on
TV. Dedicated to providing lifetime learning, ETV gears its production to people of all ages
through enrichment programs for preschoolers, entertainment programs for youth, educational
courses for adults, and news broadcasts for all.
3. Conclusion

In summary, Israel is one of the most powerful educated country in the world showed by
the fact that 45% of its population has a university or college degree. Approximately 97.1% of its
total population is literate, and these achievements are a long term effort that has been initiated
long time back after the state was founded. Several problems, such as the high demands of
learning materials due to large number of immigrants came, are able to be solved by effective
money management and systematic policies. The number of books including textbooks are
increasing and sufficient enough, yet there are still several problems with the contents.
Alternative way of learning materials are also invented, for example, the very well-known
educational television channel which able to widen the local people knowledge despite of their
age. Israeli government, especially the Ministry of Education, has done a very effective and
efficient decision to develop and increase the quality of national education year by year. They are
not only tried to study the issues and problems found regarding the learning materials, but also
doing several cooperation with both international organization such as UNESCO and local
universities and professors. Critics and opinion from every elements are listened and considered
as a feedback that could improve the on-going system.
References

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