Nation-Building and Curriculum Innovation in Israel
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Nation-Building and Curriculum Innovation in Israel Suzanne Last Stone
Accepted: 1 September 2020 # The National Association of Scholars 2020
Against all current trends—from the dismantling of the project of the Western canon to the devaluation of a liberal arts degree as a useless pursuit—in 2013, a group of Princeton alumni who had emigrated to the State of Israel established the first liberal arts college in the Jewish state. Shalem College, which will welcome its sixth class this October, was envisioned as a nation-building enterprise, paralleling the mission with which numerous American universities once identified: the preparation of leaders and citizens who could serve the nation. As the 2007 prospectus put it, Shalem was envisioned as a “College of the Jewish People,” a college that would raise up a “different kind of Israeli and Jewish leadership.” The nation-building model of college education traditionally sought to create future leaders in the political and cultural sphere of the nation-state by exposing students to Western moral and political philosophy, to literature and the arts, and to other disciplines collectively known as the “humanities,” as well as to the cultural resources of their own particular national tradition. The hope was to produce individuals with a deep appreciation of both their particular national tradition—including its inevitable failings and the creative responses crises engendered—and the broader achievements of human civilization. The idea of a core curriculum arose in the context of this nation-building model. It relied on the view that the study of a set of common texts could provide society with a common language and play a formative role in the shaping of that society. 1 These texts are sources of values, examples of aesthetic achievement, 1
For a lucid discussion of the various functions of a canonical text (normative, formative, and exemplary), see Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority in Judaism (Harvard, 1997). Suzanne Last Stone is University Professor at Yeshiva University and Professor of Law at Cardozo Law School; [email protected].
S.L. Stone
or, simply, texts that a culture “thinks with—reads, interprets, and re-interprets—-as it progresses through time.” Yet, despite the strong nation-building focus of early Zionism, which found expression in elementary and high school curricula in Israel, no liberal arts colleges existed in the state until Shalem College opened its doors. Israel’s universities follow the European model. Students enter college at a relatively advanced age, after years of army service, and plunge immediately into a major designed to lead to professional advancement. Israel, moreover, is known for its technological ingenuity and accomplishments, which has led to the increasing siphoning off of resources from the humanities to the scientific disciplines that have contributed to Israel’s international status. The establishment of Shalem College along the lines of this older American model was not merely an attempt to r
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