National education: the annual field trip as an instrument of national education in Israel’s State education system, 2008–2020

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to assess the way annual highschool field trips in Israel’s State educational system is used to inculcate national narratives. Based on copious data, it shows that knowing and loving the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel) are significant motifs that recur with high intensity in all school field trip programmememes. Concurrently, however, in view of the high frequency of national motives in these trips, integrating the national aspect has apparently become a codeword for the ‘right way’ to plan out and carry out field trips.

KEYWORDS:

• Israel
• Land of Israel
• Yishhuv
• Zionism
• education
• highschool field trip

To educate one, it is not enough for us to open the wellspring of the spirit of Israel to him. Rather, it is our task to bring one into direct contact with the nature of our land, blessed with sights to see … Love of the homeland is acquired by experiencing the tribulations of wandering and exploring the highways and byways, and the more one travels the more passionate one will be for one’s homeland.¹

With these words, the travel guides Pinhas Cohen and David Benvenisti prefaced their guide to Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel), published in the late 1930s. In their view, one way to build a new society grounded in Zionist narratives and nurturing the Jewish connection with the ancestral homeland was to take people on field trips around the country. In fact, the field trip became a prominent educational feature in the curriculum in various educational settings, from local preschools and primary schools, through high schools, and up to teachers seminars, all established in the country at the beginning of modern Jewish settlement in the 1880s.² The religious model of pilgrimage was consciously avoided in these trips, with the outings having no specific sacred destination and no connection with any religious belief system. Instead, they were dominated by thinking about nature and education in the manner of the Jewish Enlightenment. That was similar to European thought about tourist travel at the time, centring on modern scientific observation, and also to some extent on entertainment and attention to children’s need to be in the open air. As the Zionist project in Eretz Israel expanded, and the existential struggles of the Yishuv (the organised pre-independant Jewish community) against the British and the Arab population increased, so the land itself became charged with more and more national significance. The Yishuv leadership saw outings around the country and direct acquaintance with its features as an important educational tool for promoting Zionist ideology. This enhanced national consciousness and promoted independent Jewish sovereignty in the country. By implication, beyond their pedagogical goals, these outings had an emphasis on the national aspect that combined proud national defiance in the sense of ‘We’re here despite it all!’³

After the attainment of statehood in May 1948, field trips continued to figure prominently in defining the way the landscape fit into patterns of symbolic memory. Many perceived these trips as proof of ownership of the land; and the individual’s physical struggle with the hardships of the trip were seen as equivalent to the national struggle to gain control of the country.⁴ From the Yishuv’s standpoint, even in the first stages of the country’s education system, there was a need to anchor the guidelines and the way the country should be explored with rules and regulations that were given (and were occasionally updated) in instructions from the Director General for Field Trips at the Ministry of Education.⁵ Over the years, the Director General’s instructions emphasised the nature of the field trip as an intrinsic value and meaningful activity associated with the national education system’s values and goals.⁶ However, in 2004, the Israel State Comptroller published a sharp critique of field trips in the educational system, pointing out the defects and vagueness of the guidelines as well the conduct of school field trips.⁷ He stressed, inter alia, the opacity and the flawed attention to the trip’s pedagogical aspect.⁸ Pursuant to the report, the State Control Committee of the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) convened in order to formalise and define the rules and regulations pertaining to these outings.⁹ In 2008, in accordance with the committee’s conclusions and guidelines, the Ministry of Education published a ‘core programmememe for field trips’ that was meant mainly to regulate the pedagogical contents of the organisation and conduct of field trips in the education system.¹⁰ Among the principal goals, as stated at the beginning of the programmememe, the field trips are intended to ‘acquaint the pupils with love of the homeland, and to cultivate a commitment to, and responsibility for Eretz Israel, its landscape, nature, human society, and the State of Israel’. Emphasis was given to attaining the national objectives of the field trip by reinforcing national consciousness in connection with the history and legacy of the [Jewish] people in the Land of Israel’.¹¹

According to nationalism scholar Hedva Ben-Israel, research that links education and nationalism should also examine the strategies by which national ideas are mobilised in order to instil national narratives among those participating in the field trips.¹² Drawing on her approach, this article assesses the way the annual high-school field trip in Israel’s State educational system is used to inculcate national narratives that help to create national identity among students. It does so by analysing a variety of sources: school field trip programmememes,¹³ school correspondence and documents relating to annual field trips,¹⁴ and interviews with field trip coordinators in selected schools.¹⁵ These yielded an updated view with which it could analyse the goals and culture of school field trips programmememes.

To choose the schools, we used the ‘Be-mabat rahav’ (From a Broad Perspective) database. The information in this database is grounded in an educational information system developed by the Director of Digital Communication and Information Systems at the Ministry of Education.¹⁶ We used the database to choose recognised schools in the State (Jewish) sector in five Ministry of Education districts: North, Haifa, Center, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem.¹⁷ The State junior and senior high schools sampled in this article are representative of the various districts in the State Jewish sector in accordance with size.¹⁸

To analyse the data, we selected several leading schools that have had large enrolments (at least 1,000 pupils) over several years in order to gather data that may provide information about the centrality and meaningful role of the school as a leading and formative institution in the community.¹⁹ Another source used to assess the educational atmosphere in the schools studied is the ‘Shkifut be-hinukh’ (Transparency in education) database.²⁰ This Ministry of Education database, operative since 2015, contains budgetary and quantitative data about the schools that we examined.

National education, collective memory, and school field trips

The philosopher of education Zvi Lamm defines national education as the kind that should ‘instill in the individual an awareness and a sense of belonging to the people and the state and implant feelings that support this belonging’.²¹ The ways and means of national education include study of history, literature, and geography, and the cultivation of effective responses to national symbols and heroes and the way they are used in rituals. Thus, a connection with individuals’ national culture and its values is emphasised as an outgrowth of their relationship with universal values.²² The renowned nationalism scholar Anthony Smith stresses the common narrative that members of a people create by investing shared symbols, myths, and memories with meaning. Only by virtue of longstanding traditions and narratives, he claims, do peoples preserve themselves and remain willing to accept the principle of their nationhood. Examples are Zionism’s use of myths such as Trumpeldor and the battle at Tel Hai and the uprising of the Sicarii zealots at Masada. Indeed, Tel Hai and Masada are two of the most popular destinations of school field trips over the years. They have historical roots and create the wish to recapture that heroism – a foundational ethos that became central in the shared national ethos that evolved in the modern Jewish national revival in Eretz Israel.²³ In keeping with this outlook, it is arguable that the annual field trips serve the goal of territorialising memory: a process in which certain places evoke a string of memories that persist intergenerationally and generate a tendency to instil narratives of persons and events in certain places and, by their means, to create strong and unique nexuses with specific geographical landscapes.²⁴ If so, one may hypothesise that the sites where guidance is given and the field trips itineraries are mobilised for generating ‘collective memory’ among participants, in an attempt to produce a national connection and sense of belonging to the land. The French historian Pierre Nora, whose work is of foundational importance in defining terms relating to collective memory, notes that perception of the past and collective memory mean relating to the past, in many senses, as something that persists and remains relevant in the present as well.²⁵ The provinces of past memory that can be ‘revived’ by being emphasised in the present comprise three main elements: material, functional, and symbolic. Together, they form a collective memory and concurrently, albeit at a different level, an interaction among factors that define each other. Material aspects may be archival materials; examples of functional aspects can be textbooks or monuments. Symbolic aspects are, for example, a memorial candle, a moment of silence, or a ritual. Pursuant to Nora’s postulates, we argue that school field trips may also create symbolic memory via the ritual of overcoming difficulties in reaching the destination, receiving the contents of the guidance given, touring battlefield legacy sites, and visiting monuments; all these help to preserve the collective social memory as a living one in participants’ consciousness.²⁶ Visits to heritage sites in annual field trips may result in creating mutual memories, an essential means of orientation. The shared memory at these sites, created during an annual field trip, shapes the group’s perception of identity and thus helps to establish an infrastructure for the desired social order.²⁷

School field trips in Israel: the state of research

As Lamm, Smith, and Nora indicate, various actions may generate a sense of national identity and link the individual with narratives shared by a larger group. In the Israeli context, studies on the topic of school field trips deserve examination to identify a connection between identity-creating strategies and these trips as engines of change in participants’ national identity. Two conspicuous studies deal with this intent. In the first, Ehud Prawer investigated the workings of field trips in Eretz Israel in 1887–1918.²⁸ His study focused on three schools: Lömel in Jerusalem, Haviv in Rishon Lezion, and Herzliya Gymnasium in Tel Aviv. Prawer claims that present and past, Bible and geography, all converge in Eretz Israel and that young people should be educated in accordance with this fusion. His main conclusion is that a change occurred in the purpose of these outings from a scholastic goal – emphasising the reinforcement of study of various subjects by means of learning in the course of trips, such as geography, history, and zoology – to an educational goal centring on strengthening the connection with the people and the Land of Israel. Until 1907, Prawer argues, field trips focused on the learning process, the development of universal values, and a focus on the land as representative of nature. From 1907 onwards, the trips began to concentrate on conveying knowledge about the past and nature of the land, developing national identity, and emphasising landscape and nature as parts of Eretz Israel.²⁹

The second study on the linkage between modern Jewish nationalism and the characteristics of the annual field trip in the education system is by Oded Avissar, who expanded the years examined to 1947–88 and investigated the field trip’s evolution during that time, with emphasis on the changes that occurred in the trip’s ideological, social, political, and historical goals.³⁰ Avissar chose this time frame because it was then that most of the entities that deal with guiding these trips were shaped, crystallised, and even institutionalised. The main purpose of his study is to investigate what the changes that occurred in the guidance programmememes in yedi’at haaretz (Knowing the Land)³¹ field trips reflected, the impact of these changes on the trip’s intensity, and from where the trips get their validity and centrality. Avissar concluded, inter alia, that trips were tailored in their objectives and goals to historical events and served the social and ideological norms and values of sovereign Israel in its first years. On the other hand, despite the changes and historical and ideological upheavals that Israel has experienced since then, the main goals of field trips in the late 1970s remained somewhat identical to those of the early field trips, chiefly conveying pedagogical and scholastic contents by leading students into the outdoors.

By reviewing the literature in this field, this article finds that yedi’at haaretz field trips were of immense importance in shaping national education from the very beginning of the modern Jewish national revival in Eretz Israel as well as in the years following the establishment of statehood.

The annual field trip since 2008: qualitative analysis

Before an annual field trip begins, schools give the students a circular providing instructions for the outing and usually emphasising its goals and contents. To see how schools relate to the role and importance of the field trip as an instrument of national education, the values that find expression in these documents need to be examined. Our qualitative review of the national contents and narratives identified four salient components of the field-trip experience that serve the cause of national education in the course of these trips: attention to imparting familiarity with the country and the attainment of this goal via identification with the effective and national aspect of the matter (patriotism); an attempt to create a connection between the sites visited during the trip and the Bible and events mentioned in it; holding ceremonies with national content at selected sites during the trip; and making the trip challenging in order to amplify students’ emotional experience.

Instilling knowledge and love of the country

The expression yedi’at haaretz in the modern era was evidently coined in 1845 by Yehosef Schwarz in the preface to his book Tevu’ot haaretz.³² The meaning of this term, as Schwarz indicates, is that apart from getting to know the places and sites themselves, an emotional and experiential connection between the individual and the country should be established. In an attempt to connect the term knowing the Land with loving it, the nexus of the act undertaken (the field trip) and the emotion experienced (love) is emphasised.

According to Katz, when trips to outlying areas of the country became established over the course of the Yishuv era, the attitude towards yedi’at haaretz created an intersection of knowledge and effect – between scientific facts and values and Jewish and Zionist-pioneering legends. Pictorial and literary motifs were invoked to assimilate the affective meanings of the landscapes of Eretz Israel.³³ In David Ben-Gurion’s words: ‘Love of homeland is not created by preaching. A condition for love of homeland is knowing the homeland and seeking roots in the homeland. One does not know a homeland from books, from stories, but from what one sees, from unmediated familiarity’.³⁴

The following survey gives examples of the way those responsible for field trips emphasised this emotional nexus of knowing the country and loving it among trip participants. At the Katzir School in Rehovot, organisers of field trips inserted the following remark in all circulars preceding the trips: ‘One of the main purposes of the field trip is nurturing love of Eretz Israel and improving familiarity with it’.³⁵ This objective appears clearly and prominently in the pre-outing instructions. The organisers wrote, in effect, that a successful field trip is one that connects the geographic and cultural facet and knowledge of this aspect with the trip’s destinations, eliciting both love and identification with the places visited. A similar statement appeared at a comprehensive school in Ashdod, where field trip organisers wrote in all circulars: ‘The annual field trip is a social experience and an opportunity to create class solidarity, enhance pupils’ fortitude, and reinforce love of and connection with the land’.³⁶ Again, the trip is seen as a way of strengthening participants’ emotional connection with (love of) Eretz Israel, a device that the school uses to amplify students’ sense of belonging to their country.

Pre-outing circulars at the Branco Weiss School (Jerusalem District) emphasise: ‘This is an educational trip that is taken in order to gain knowledge and love of the homeland on the basis of a learning process in school combined with study and reinforcement of central values of national belonging, independence, and group belonging’.³⁷ Here an attempt is made to tether scholastic processes to emotion. The field trip is the practical manifestation of a pedagogical process that takes place in school. The author of the circular states that after students go through a scholastic and educational process on the school premises, the field trip is a practical step in which the learning process finds expression and links awareness and pedagogy to the affective aspect of ‘love of homeland’. The organisers of the field trip define it as an educational measure that serves the goal of creating an intersection between geographical familiarity with the country and a heightened sense of belonging based on an emotional experience, in which participants will learn to ‘love’ the homeland.

The Hebrew Reali School in Haifa has a longstanding and well-established legacy of field trips. It is noted for sending its students on lengthy and relatively difficult trips that include overnighting outdoors, preparing meals in the open, taking difficult hikes, and spending more days travelling than the average examined in this study.³⁸ On its website, the school explains the field trips’ importance for the school’s identity:

By means of field trips and forays up, down, and across the country, we instill in our students the wish to get to know Israel more deeply … Quality field trips that include challenging hikes, sleeping in the open, and cooking on their own, deviating from ordinary comfortable life, create profound experiences that, together with exposure to the tradition and history of the People Israel in its land, amplify the students’ familiarity with the land, the people, and the state, in the sense of belonging to them.³⁹

This example illustrates the way field trips should be reflected in the heightening of students’ sense of belonging. This ‘profound experience’ cannot possibly be attained without pedagogical preparation in class, intended to make students realise that it is the challenge of the effort that will lead them to the desired sense of belonging. These and other examples reviewed by this study suffice to illuminate the strategy of creating deliberate and clear consciousness in students and parents. The main purpose of field trips, the school explains, is to bolster the sense of loving and belonging to Eretz Israel. The message expressly given to students even before the field trip begins is that to attain the trip’s goals, they are expected, among other things, to become excited by the sites and trails they will visit and regard them all as part of the shared national narrative.

Journeying with the Bible

Connecting biblical stories with love and knowledge of Eretz Israel in the national sense is a recurrent practice that has been invoked since the very dawn of Hebrew education. The use of the Bible as a teaching apparatus for descriptions of the landscape on field trips shows the students that the homeland carries a heavy load of national experiences and emotions from the past that project something of their spirit onto the present day.⁴⁰ Anita Shapira describes this outlook aptly: ‘The Second Aliyah people traversed the country with the Bible in hand and identified toponyms that are mentioned in Scripture. Their offspring adopted the assumption that the Bible is a guide to yedi’at haaretz, a guide to [the country’s] fauna and flora’.⁴¹ The Ministry of Education also considers it very important to make the Bible a part of the school field trips guidelines. In 2019, the-then Director General, Shmuel Abohav, addressed himself to the use of the Bible on school field trips:

The Bible is the Book of Books and the foundation of our People’s existence. From it we derive language and culture, laws and ethics, history and wisdom. We wish to instill the amazing values that it contains in our students. Via the motion of their legs and the vision of their eyes, we will impart to them the values of the Prophets of Israel, the Kings of Israel, and [the nation’s] great and important leaders.⁴²

Our survey of school field trip programmememes shows that the Bible and biblical events are extensively referenced during the outings. Itineraries stress various narratives and other aspects of biblical accounts. What these narratives have in common is the close relation they establish between a seminal and highly meaningful event at the site, and the history of the Jewish People. At Yitzhak Rabin High School in Eilat, circulars preceding annual field trips include ‘strengthening the [Jewish] legacy in [Israel], the Zionist legacy, nature, and the Bible’ among the pedagogical objectives.⁴³ In 2019, the school went on a three-day field trip in northern Israel, called ‘A Journey in the Footsteps of the Bible’. In the circular preceding this excursion, students were told that the trip would focus on biblical stories in the Carmel Mountain and Jezreel Valley areas, and that they would learn about various personalities and narratives in the respective sites in the itinerary. The Keren ha-Carmel site is devoted to the Prophet Elijah, his struggle against the prophets of Ba’al, and his religious devotion. There would be a stop at Ketef Shaul on Mount Gilboa, a place customarily associated with the battle on that mountain, the death of King Saul, and David’s lament. By implication, the persona of the first King of Israel and his resolve to fall on his sword and not be captivated by the enemy would be strongly emphasised. Both sites stress the power of Jewish national leaders who acted doggedly and bravely in their own way and for their faith.⁴⁴

Danziger School in Kiryat Shmona, enumerating the pedagogical goals of its field trips to Upper and Lower Galilee, emphasises objectives such as acquainting students with the Zionist legacy in Israel, the Jewish national heritage, biblical stories, and nature.⁴⁵ The itineraries that appear on this school’s field trip programmememes dovetail with these objectives. The hike up the Arbel cliff is a case in point. Vestiges of an ancient synagogue and tombs are observable there, and it is customary to stress the account of the Jews besieged in the Arbel caves during the rebellion against Rome in the Second Temple era, as well as their resolve and steadfastness against the Romans and refusal to surrender and let the enemy take them prisoner. One of the best-known tragedies attributed to the siege of Arbel is the story of an elderly Jew who refused to heed the Romans’ call for surrender, slaughtered his wife and children, and leaped off the cliff to his death.⁴⁶ The narrative of fighting the Romans and preferring to die rather than fall into Roman captivity is familiar; it recurs in the siege of Masada (Judean Desert), the battle for Yodfat (Lower Galilee), and the Jewish locality of Gamla (Golan Heights).

In some of the years examined by this study, the Hadera Municipal High School, one of the oldest schools in that city (est. 1936), presented the district field trip committee with a programme for the ninth grade that includes a three-day visit to the Judean Hills and Jerusalem. One of the goals, the organisers note, is to give students a deeper acquaintance with the Bible by providing instruction on biblical events that took place in the area. The itinerary of the field trip corresponds to its pedagogical objectives, with students sleeping overnight in a tent encampment on the Nes Harim grounds and combine a visit to Jerusalem with hikes in the Judean hills and foothills. The sites in Jerusalem include the Old City’s Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall. Other stops include Nahal Kedoshim, the Bnei Brit Cave, the Scroll of Fire monument, and the Sataf nature reserve. The sites in Jerusalem afford multiple opportunities to create a connection with the Scripture; the trails in nature have the same effect. The Sataf reserve, where visitors can view the reconstructed ancient hill agriculture of that area, effectively stresses the historical association with the region. In fact, this is one of the main reasons for the preservation of ancient agriculture at Sataf. Visiting students learn about terrace farming and the tilling and stone-clearing operations that had to be carried out in order to build the terraces; they also get an impression of additional agricultural structures, such as a wine press and a guard tower. The entire visit is geared to connecting visitors with the way their ancestors inhabited the site two thousand years ago.⁴⁷

At Hashmonaim Comprehensive School in Bat Yam, ninth graders took a field trip in 2019 called ‘In the Footsteps of the Bible’. The circular relating to the outing began with an adage of Ben-Gurion that linked the Bible to the Jewish People’s possession of Eretz Israel: ‘The Bible is our mandate. The Bible was written by us, in our language of Hebrew and in this country itself’.⁴⁸ The author of the circular then states:

This year we will head out for a three-day trip to [Mount] Carmel and the Jezreel Valley in the footsteps of biblical stories. On the first day, we will tour the Carmel, learn about the story of Elijah on the Carmel, and discuss dilemmas of zealotry and indifference. On the second day, we will hike on Mt. Tabor and learn about biblical personalities, and on the last day, we will follow the footsteps of Saul, David, and Jonathan on Mount Gilboa and clarify the extent of the value of responsibility in our lives.⁴⁹

It appears that a field trip that treats biblical stories as its central motif is designed to make its participants identify with ancient national-symbolic elements, thus linking the present with the historical past of the venue. By choosing sites that emphasise formative events, the organisers expose visitors to the Jewish People’s profound relationship with the places visited. The narratives taught may not be free of criticism; they may lend themselves to discussion of dilemmas related to the moral and value quality of the events in question. Thus, at Keren ha-Carmel, the Prophet Elijah murdered hundreds of prophets of Ba’al in an outburst of religious zealotry; at Arbel, some preferred to kill themselves and slay others for the cause of freedom rather than respect the value of life. Other narratives connect visitors with the history and shaping of the Jews who inhabited the sites (thriving ancient agriculture in the Judean Hills; Saul’s battles on Mount Gilboa; David and Goliath and Samson in the Judean foothills). All of them help to link the heyday of the ancient Hebrew nation with that of the renewed modern iteration.⁵⁰

Ceremonies

Another way of reinforcing the national motif is by holding ceremonies during the field trip.⁵¹ Ceremonies are symbolic events that amplify the importance of the event to which they are oriented. At sites that commemorate the battlefield legacy, for example, a ceremony is a medium that preserves a social order. Narratives of protection, defence, and even sacrifice of life for the homeland are legitimised in order to enhance social cohesion and national identity among field trips participants.⁵²

A briefing prepared for students at Shehakim School in Nahariya before their field trip stated: ‘There will be three ceremonies during the trip: One will be at the beginning of the hike on the Israel Trail at Mt. Keren Naftali. The second will be at the trailhead on the fourth day at the Roaring Lion statue at Tel Hai [near Kfar Giladi]. The third will be at the end of the hike on Wednesday at the Snir River nature reserve’.⁵³

By scheduling three ceremonies during a four-day field trip, the organisers attested to the importance attributed to holding them. The roaring-lion monument at Kfar Giladi is a symbol of Jewish determination, heroism, and self-sacrifice that became a myth with Trumpeldor’s demise in Tel Hai. The ceremony at the monument to the helicopter disaster at She’ar Yashuv, in memory of the 73 soldiers who perished in that tragedy, is intended, and may serve as a way to generate empathy among the students and amplify their sense of belonging to and responsibility for the places where soldiers fought and died in the course of their military service.⁵⁴ In a ceremony held at the monument during a field trip of ninth-graders from a school in Nes Tsiyyona, participants heard, among other things:

We ninth graders from the David Ben-Gurion Education Campus in Nes Tsiyyona have come here today not to be sad and not to cancel the pleasure of our annual field trip … Unfortunately, however, this country is saturated with pain and bereavement, and while we hope for peace, we have responsibility for protecting what we got and for defending this place, because we are able to visit and enjoy this area by virtue of those who were willing to pay the highest price, their lives, to defend this country. We are entitled to continue enjoying, but never to forget.⁵⁵

The field trip plans of the ORT Ronson School in Ashkelon also refer to ceremonies related to battlefield legacy and Zionist heritage ahead of annual trips to the Gilboa area and the Lower Galilee. Here the ceremonies allude to various events that may create identification with collective memory both in the historical sense (the inception of Zionist settlement in Eretz Israel) and from the biblical perspective. At the ceremony, students explicitly mention the battles of Saul at Gilboa, the completion of the Jerusalem Talmud in nearby Tiberias, and refer to localities in the vicinity and the onset of Zionist settlement in the Jezreel Valley.⁵⁶

The ceremonies described above are but a few examples of many diverse ceremonies uncovered by this study. They attest to how the landscape, the itinerary, and the area visited are mobilised to create various levels of connection between students and patriotism and their right to the country. The events mentioned in the ceremonies link the provinces of memory at the symbolic level by presenting students both with the biblical stories that took place there and events that establish a solid legacy in the place, tracing back to the days of the First Aliyah, through the stories of battles and monuments of recent times. The ceremonies are intended to stir emotions of identification with a range of aspects of the place that they are visiting and exploring. At the ceremony at the helicopter disaster monument, a link to the beauty of the country is made but, equally, students are reminded that the lovely landscape was redeemed with the blood of soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice. Thus, the visitors realise that they should appreciate and remember what these soldiers did and the price they paid so that they, the students, may continue to visit. The nexus created by this statement is somewhat artificial because the monument does not symbolise a battle that took place there or a heroic feat in which the soldiers fell to enemy fire in defence of She’ar Yashuv. The event commemorated by the monument, of course, is a ghastly tragedy in which, on a stormy night, 73 soldiers perished in an accident involving two helicopters en route to operational activity in Lebanon.⁵⁷

The motif of planning the ceremonies recurs intensively in all field trip programmes we examined in at least one grade. In schools that took part in structured outings, such as those called ‘Masa Israeli’ (Israeli journey), ‘Masa im ha-Tanakh’ (Journey with the Bible), and ‘Le-Ovda u-le-Shomra’ (To cultivate and protect it – cf. Gen. 2:15), as well as other identity-shaping trips, students participate in the ceremonies simply because they take part in the trip. By implication, ceremonies play a central role during the annual field trip. Their purposes are functional and symbolic; their aim is to form and shape the students’ collective memory.

The field trip experience

The field trip creates an experience that challenges its participants both physically and mentally. Climbing mountains, crossing obstacles, going without sleep, and contending with heat or cold serve as tests of essential character traits such as willpower, determination, and self-restraint. Indeed, Almog describes the Yishuv-era field trips as tests of character:

The trips had didactic ideological value that was no less than [their] military value … Hiking and sleeping in nature symbolised direct contact with the country. The end of grueling hikes in places of historical significance (Masada, Bet She’arim, etc.) and the swearing-in and baton-passing ceremonies that took place at the end of many trips made them into mass pilgrimages, so to speak, to the ‘temples of Zionism’.⁵⁸

The postulate that emerges from Almog’s remarks is that by enduring the hardships of field trips participants pledge allegiance, as it were, to the collective national framework of the nation and the state. The more effort they need to expend and the more powerful the experience they undergo, the more profound is the unifying national context of the participants – in this case, the students – in the setting of the annual field trip.

In preparations for a ‘Masa Israeli’ at Shehakim School in Nahariya,⁵⁹ the first part of the trip was associated with rigorous physical effort and self-discipline. The authors of the circular preceding the trip explained:

We are heading out on a Masa Israeli with your son/daughter. Much has been invested in this unique and value-centric outing. Therefore, it is important for us that if your children are reluctant to take the trip, you convince them [to participate]. Your son/daughter needs to reach the schoolyard by 11:30 p.m. There we will organise in order to set out a short time after midnight. Masa Israeli is a project based on inquiry, togetherness, and reinforcement of the Israeli and Zionist identity of youth by going to national landscapes, combining scenery and content.⁶⁰

By implication, the excursion being prepared for is not meant merely to provide an experience or group cohesion. Rather, it is a complex, lengthy journey; even its time of departure, in the middle of the night, cannot be taken for granted. This trip entails an effort by its participants. The students are explicitly advised even before they set out that to attain the trip’s objectives successfully, they are expected, among other things, to relate emotionally to the sites and trails they will be visiting and to feel that all of these belong to the shared national narrative.

At Danziger School in Kiryat Shmona, preparations for a 2015 masa noded (an ‘itinerant’ field trip) for twelfth grade in the Eilat mountains indicate that the trip will involve arduous hiking, lengthy stays in the open, and multiple physical challenges. The written preparatory material tells participants to expect ‘lengthy ascents’, hiking ‘without shade’, trails that include ‘support stakes’, danger of falling’, and narrow paths in parts of the trip.⁶¹ The trip is marketed not only as a ‘fun’ or experiential activity but as a meaningful challenge that may even be dangerous at times. The outing is portrayed as a mission that should be carried out to its very end. The body of the briefing is to the point, omitting all mention of the tour guiding, the respites along the way, and social group formation, instead stressing the expected length of the hikes, travel instructions, topographical conditions, and safety precautions. The authors’ interview with the school’s field trip coordinator confirmed the attitude towards the field trip as an experiential and challenging act meant to give the outing a dimension of emotional depth and meaning for its participants.⁶²

In a 2017 field trip for ninth-graders at Comprehensive School A, part of the Reali Gymnasium in Rishon Lezion, participants toured the Upper Galilee and the sources of the Jordan River.⁶³ Preparing for the trip, students were told of the following, inter alia:

Overnighting in Masa ha-Kokhav [the name of the trip] is done under outdoor/camping conditions—four-person igloo tents, sleeping bags, and field mattresses for which students are responsible. The area where we will spend the night is on the Jordan-Kfar Blum grounds. The night will be spent on the grass, with latrines and showers nearby … From the first evening onward, all meals will be prepared and cooked by the students themselves, with guidance from the teachers.⁶⁴

Thus, students are being prepared for the physical effort and the outdoors experience that awaits them, while, on the other hand, in accordance with twenty-first-century realities, they will also have latrines and shower facilities, comfortable grass to sleep on, and a staff of teachers to help them fix their meals. The outing’s organisers apparently intended to give students an experience that would transcend the actual hike. The process emphasises and strengthens the bond between participants and the parts of the country they will be visiting, shaping their national identity in view of the challenges and journey, thereby inviting participants to idealise the landscape. The way they should relate to the venues of the trip has a meaningful effect on how they will define their national identity.⁶⁵ The school emphasises the ‘special experiences’ that students will have during the outing, attributing them to the students’ steadily deepening connection with the state both as individuals and as members of a group. The nature of the trip as a group endeavour, and a collective achievement, not an individual one, resembles the conquest of a military objective. Presenting an achievement in collective terms places an additional burden of expectations on the individual, emphasising collective success in addition to personal success. It obliges individuals to act and expend effort for the collective preparing, hauling backpacks, and expending physical effort. These, together with hiking ‘for the sake of the State of Israel’, make the trip into a group endeavour that promotes the sense of belonging to the national narrative.⁶⁶

The annual field trip since 2008 – quantitative analysis

In accordance with instructions from the Director General of the Ministry of Education, schools must present their annual programmes each year.⁶⁷ A survey of these programmes at the national level yields interesting quantitative data, among which we have chosen to analyse the pedagogical content of the trip.⁶⁸

Pedagogical contents of the field trip

The theme of tour guiding on field trips deserves careful examination because there is no restriction on the contents that organisers can define as pedagogic matters worthy of attention during the trip. There is no effective way to determine if the declared pedagogical contents of the various documents are delivered during the actual trip. Nonetheless, this study analyses the data based on the pedagogical contents that coordinators reported, because most contents emphasise the ‘Zionist legacy’ and ‘the Bible’. The very fact of the mass repetition of these expressions as objectives to be attained on the annual field trips gives an indication of the organisers’ intentions and, to a considerable extent, reflects what take place on the trip itself.

Table

Grade Scholastic theme	7th	8th	9th	10th	11th	12th	Not noted	Total
Details missing	265	243	366	343	203	295	9	1724
Nature only	43	37	60	75	66	73		354
Jewish legacy in Eretz Israel	58	56	83	119	102	152		570
Jewish legacy in Eretz Israel, Zionist legacy, nature, Bible	1358	1064	1201	1084	1095	878	41	5626
Bible only	18	26	27	19	7	10		107
Zionist legacy, Bible	193	172	164	204	158	200		1091
Ancient civilisations only	27	24	17	22	18	20		128
Ancient civilisations, nature, Bible	28	46	24	25	12	24		159
Religions and ethnicities in Israel	34	36	34	29	21	17		171
Grand total	2024	1704	1976	1920	1682	1669	50	11,025

The Table above shows that four themes in combination – Jewish legacy in Eretz Israel, Zionist legacy, nature, and Bible – appear most frequently as pedagogical objectives and goals to be achieved during the field trip. The combination of Zionist legacy and the Bible receives the largest number of mentions, the choice of only one or two themes appears much less frequently, and the combination of multiple themes occurs most frequently in seventh grade. It is therefore assumed that the pedagogical contents of the annual field trips become more meaningful and comprehensive after the students advance to junior high. The field trip at this level, unlike that undertaken in primary school, is part of students’ entrance into the world of adolescence. As a result, it is given profound and rich contents that reinforce the importance of the annual field trip. Another finding in the Table needing explanation is the high incidence of instruction in Bible and Zionist legacy, mainly in seventh and tenth grades. The number of field trips and of schools participating in them is much higher in the Tel Aviv and Central districts than in the other districts. Analysing the destinations of field trips for these grades, seventh grade is set aside for trips to the Gilboa area, eastern Galilee, and western Galilee, and the tenth grades visit the Judean Desert and the Negev. These regions abound with landmarks of Zionist legacy and biblical stories (Modern Hebrew settlement in the Jezreel Valley, the stories of King Saul and the Prophet Elijah in the Gilboa region and eastern Galilee; the stories of Masada, David at Ein Gedi, and the struggle for conquest of the Negev in the Southern District). This may explain the preponderance of content of Jewish legacy in Eretz Israel, Zionist legacy, nature, and Bible in grades seven and ten. The Table also shows that in tenth grade, the most common combination of themes and that of the highest intensity (878) is Jewish legacy in Eretz Israel, Zionist legacy, nature, and Bible. This is presumably due to students’ maturity and their ability to accommodate a wide variety of themes, together with the ambition of the educational system and the teachers to sum up the required knowledge as students are about graduate from the Israeli educational system.

Conclusion

Over the years, instructions from the Ministry of Education concerning field trips have stressed the immense importance of the trips as meaningful and value-intensive activities. As this article showed, knowing and loving the Land of Israel are significant motifs that recur with high intensity in all school field trip programmes. The objective of connecting students with their country appears repeatedly as central in preparing for and planning the trips. The numerous field trip circulars presented in this article begin with statements such as ‘The annual field trip will establish a connection between the students and the state’, ‘The trip will intensify students’ identification with the places they will be visiting’, or ‘The trip will enhance the students’ love of their country’.

This ritual of using national terminology that invokes expressions such as ‘love’, ‘identity’, and ‘connection’ is indicative of how students are expected to relate to the trip even before it begins. The message students receive is that to meet the goals of the trip, they are expected to develop a deeper connection with the visited places. This way, those at the helm of education in Israel hope to strengthen shared narratives and memories. These goals are at the core of national education as manifested in the annual field trip.

This outlook began in 2000, when the State Education Law was amended with regard to the goals of education, the values, as well as the social and effective objectives that students should attain. Section 2 of the amendment, for example, referring to the objectives of social education, states that the goal is ‘to educate individuals to be humanitarian, benevolent, and patriotic – loyal citizens of the state of Israel who respect their parents and family, legacy, cultural identity, and language’.⁶⁹ The qualitative and quantitative analyses in this article show that the annual field trips in the State school system emphasise national education, mainly by imparting yedi’at haaretz (‘knowing the Land’), using biblical stories, holding ceremonies during the trip, and creating the meaningful experience of a challenging outing. Thus, too, in field trips that combine sleeping outdoors with pedagogical content geared to assimilating Zionist narratives, the trip’s programmeme places special emphasis on reinforcing the national bond that unifies the participants.

Much like Smith’s explanation of nationalism as, amongst other things, the creation of traditions and memories that make people ready to accept the principle of nationhood, today’s field trips use the commemoration of the Jewish past to offer an alternative reality for the postmodern era,⁷⁰ characterised by, inter alia, psychological alienation. This condition stems from the diverse realities that are unstable and prone to human manipulation as part of the postmodern tendency to shatter social paradigms and conventions. Contrary to this negational stance, the field trip and its wealth of national elements denote and symbolise stable values, focused narratives, and a clearly bounded framework. We offer this point of view as one of the reasons for the strong emphasis on education in nationhood and patriotism in the objectives of the field trip. If postmodernism is typified, among other characteristics, by ruling out the existence of any single essence or absolute truth and by positing clashing values that cancel each other out, then, to a large extent, the field trip may produce a safe and focused framework devoid of multiple identities and contrasting narratives. Its main motive is national education, an act that concerns itself with finding what unites and connects, as opposed to, deconstructing ‘myths’ and instilling doubts. As they hike, the students are totally ‘within’ the trip. The distractions that flood today’s students – particularly the mobile phone, the leading distractor – do not exist during a hike outdoors, or at least exist less intensively than in ordinary times. Thus, students engage in interpersonal communication and absorb the surroundings without mediation. The annual field trip may unite its participants around values such as Israeli geography, patriotism, Zionist legacy, and biblical stories. This sharing of values can be achieved through many of the trip’s activities, most of which operate at two levels:

• An intellectual level, largely expressed in ceremonies, battlefield legacy, and guidance that connects places with biblical stories and the Zionist legacy.

• An emotional level, with emphasis on long and arduous hikes around the country, social experiences that develop as this is done, excitement as the participants behold the landscapes they encounter, and the physical and emotional challenges.

As part of the core curriculum, students are required to visit Jerusalem at least three times during their studies in the State education system. To help schools comply with this directive, the Ministry of Education budgets schools’ participation in a project called ‘Na’ale le-Yerushalayim’ (Let’s go up to Jerusalem), in which students are encouraged to include the City of David in their visit. Since the City of David is run by a rightwing non-profit (Elad), there is reason to wonder whether tours given by members of this organisation can relate objectively to the multinational history of Jerusalem and the conflict that typifies life in this mixed-population city.

In 2011, concurrent with the rule about visiting Jerusalem, there was an initiative by Minister of Education Gideon Saar to encourage students to visit Hebron and the Tomb of the Patriarchs.⁷¹ The initiative had its opponents, who saw it as a move that amounted to blatant politicisation of the secular State education system for the purpose of exposing students to one view point, the Israeli national one, without giving equal attention to the complexity of the Palestinian inhabitants of the locale.⁷²

Apparently, one of the most significant challenges in designing school field trips is to preserve constructive national contents that can help unify the nation and society while avoiding narratives that downplay pluralism, human rights, and liberal values. Thus, school field trips appear to derive their importance and power from being a balancing and multidimensional tool for national education in Israel’s State education system. As such, they make a major contribution to the formation of a shared Israeli national identity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Royi Shamir

Royi Shamir is a doctoral student at the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology, Bar-Ilan University, and a Deputy Commissioner for Trips, Tel Aviv District, Ministry of Education. Kobi Cohen-Hattab is an Associate Professor at the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology, Bar-Ilan University.

Notes

1. Cohen and Benvenisti, Guide in the Land of Israel.

2. Rinot, “Education in the Land of Israel,” 621.

3. Ibid.

4. Tadmor-Shimony, National Education, 80.

5. The guidelines promulgated in these instructions express the educational and administrative principles of the Ministry of Education and the ways in which they are to be implemented. See Ministry of Education, Circulars of the Director General: https://apps.education.gov.il/mankal/default.aspx.

6. Ministry of Education, “Instructions of the Director General.”

7. Israel State Comptroller, Report 55b for 2004, 645–54.

8. Ibid., 250.

9. State Control Committee, “The 16th Knesset,” November 16, 2005.

10. Ministry of Education, The Core Programmeme.

11. Ibid.

12. Ben-Israel, In the Name of the Nation, 74–5.

13. All recognised schools (those carrying the Ministry of Education emblem) must submit an annual field trip plan, constructed jointly by the entire school faculty under the principal’s direction. See Ministry of Education, “Instructions of the Director General,” Section 3.1.1.

14. To carry out the study, we asked surveyed schools to share correspondence and documents that might be helpful in understanding how the trips were planned and carried out. The gathered docments were contingent on schools’ responsiveness and ability to assent to our requests, and differ in content and range among schools examined. Examples of such documents are security authorisations issued before each outing, specifying the hikes the school will be taking; circulars to parents and students in advance of the trip; minutes of staff meetings before and after the annual field trip; and correspondence with service providers and hospitality venues. These sources provided insights into the planning aspects of the field trips and the extent of the schools’ commitment and investment in making the annual field trip happen. See Ministry of Education, “Instructions of the Director General,” Section 3.3.2.

15. In accordance with instructions from the Director General for Field Trips, principals must appoint a member of teaching faculty as the coordinator of field trips.

16. Ministry of Education, Development Administration, “Mapping and Planning.”

17. The system also provides statistical information about schools in other sectors such as Bedouin, Arab, Haredi (ultra-Orthodox), and Non-Recognised. This article does not refer to these schools on the assumption that their field trips are different in their nature and goals.

18. We focused on junior and senior high schools because annual field trips at these levels are at least two days long if not longer. In primary schools, there is a tendency to limit field trips to a single day. The Ministry of Education core programmeme for field trips requires overnight trips only from seventh grade up.

19. In 2018, for example, in the central sector, the Dror Education Campus School had 79 classes and nearly 2,500 students; in Tel Aviv District, Hakfar Hayarok School had 71 classes and more than 2,300 students; and in the Haifa District, Amal Hadera School had 87 classes and over 2,000 students, etc.

20. Ministry of Education, Economy and Budgets Administration, “Transparency in Education.”

21. Lamm, In the Whirlpool of Ideologies, 155.

22. Ibid., 150.

23. On the Myth of Tel Hai, see Zerubavel and Goldstein, Tel Hai; for the Masada Myth, see Ben-Yehuda, The Masada Myth.

24. Smith, Chosen Peoples, 164.

25. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 12.

26. Ibid., 15.

27. For elaboration on the topic of collective memory, see Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance.

28. Prawer, “The Path.”

29. Prawer specifies 1907 as the year when changes were ripe in Eretz Israel for emphasising national identity in the course of field trips, in contrast to accenting the pedagogical and universal facets as had been the case until then. Prawer, “The Path,” 148–51.

30. Avissar, “Programmemes.”

31. The expression yedi’at haaretz, ‘Knowing the Land’, originates in ve-yad’u et haaretz, an ancient biblical phrase that appears in Numbers 14:31 – ‘But your little ones, whom ye said should be a prey, them will I bring in, and they shall know the land [ve-yad’u et haaretz] which ye have despised’. The meaning of ‘knowing’ that the verse evokes is an intimate, sensory acquaintance with the place.

32. Schwarz, Tebuoth ha-arez.

33. Katz, “The Israeli Teacher-Guide.”

34. Ben-Yehuda Project, “The Purpose of State Education.”

35. Circular ahead of annual field trip, Katzir High School, Rehovot, undated, emphasis added (private archive of Royi Shamir – hereinafter: PARS).

36. Circular ahead of annual field trip, Comprehensive School 8, Ashdod, undated, PARS (emphasis added).

37. Circular ahead of annual field trip, Branco Weiss Comprehensive School, Tzur Hadassah, undated, PARS (emphasis added).

38. It is customary to single out Herzliya Gymnasium and The Hebrew Reali School in Haifa as the schools that shaped and institutionalised annual field trips in the early Yishuv era. Almog, The Sabra, 275.

39. Hebrew Reali School, Gadna programme (emphasis added).

40. Almog, The Sabra, 265.

41. Shapira, Land and Power, 352.

42. Yarkechi, “Values for Life.”

43. Rabin High School, Eilat, field trip programme presented to the Southern District committee, 2019–2021, PARS (emphasis added).

44. Kadari, Until Elijah Comes, 147–9; and Selzer, ed., Pathways, 59–70.

45. Circular ahead of field trip, Danziger School, Kiryat Shemona, undated, PARS.

46. Meiron, ed., Sea of Galilee, 64–8.

47. Davidson, Touring with the Sources, 54–65.

48. Statement attributed to David Ben-Gurion in his testimony to the Peel Commission in 1937. For the full testimony, see Ben-Yehuda Project, “Testimony before the Royal Commission.”

49. ‘Circular to Parents and Students: A Trip in the Footsteps of the Bible’, Hashmonaim Comprehensive School, Bat Yam, 2019, PARS.

50. Almog, The Sabra, 254.

51. On ceremonies and historical memory, see Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 15.

52. Combat zones and battlefields are regular destinations of school field trips as part of a curricular programme that is referred to as ‘Battlefield Legacy’. See Kantor, “Militaristic Visual Culture,” 47.

53. Preparatory presentation for ‘Masa Israeli Tsafon’, Shehakim School, Nahariya, Feb. 25–28, year not noted, PARS.

54. As a rule, monuments are significant in commemoration of casualties and central in commemorative and memorial ceremonies. Shamir, Commemoration and Remembrance.

55. Students at the David Ben-Gurion Education Campus, Nes Tsiyyona, field trip to Upper Galilee, undated, PARS.

56. Students at the ORT Ronson School, Ashkelon, field trip to the Gilboa area, undated, PARS.

57. Feige, “The Helicopter Disaster Monument.”

58. Almog, The Sabra, 277.

59. In 2006, the Ministry of Education collaborated with the Masa Israeli non-profit to launch a new educational programme aimed at strengthening the personal, social, Zionist, Israeli, and Jewish identity of high school students in Israel. The heads of the non-profit chose the name ‘Masa Israeli’ in order to distinguish it from other school activities such as annual trips, workshops, seminars, and Gadna (the pre-military programme). Their choice of name demonstrates the wish to distinguish the trip’s experience from other educational events by linking it to the tradition of trips in the history of the Yishuv and the State of Israel. The Masa Israeli organisers claim that their trip is instrumental in cultivating Israeliness and intensifying the values that underlie it. Its success, they say, is connected with the authenticity of the activity, which affords participants an experience of Israeliness that traces back to the Israeli culture at the time statehood was established. Yair, Belong Israel, 32–3.

60. Circular ahead of ‘Masa Israeli Tsafon’, Shehakim School, Nahariya, PARS.

61. From circular for parents and students, Masa Noded – Eilat Mountains, Danziger School, Kiryat Shemona, November 22–7, 2015, PARS.

62. Authors’ interview with Rahel Salame, Kiryat Shemona, October 27, 2019, PARS.

63. Circular for ‘Kokhav Mai’ field trip, Comprehensive School A, Reali Gymnasium, Dorot Junior High, Rishon Lezion, 2017, PARS.

64. Ibid.

65. Gertel, Natural Path, 233.

66. Almog, The Sabra, 280.

67. All recognised schools (those identified as Ministry of Education institutions) must present annual field trip programmes that are put together by the entire school faculty, led by the principal. See Ministry of Education, “Instructions of the Director General,” Section 3.1.1.

68. Notably, the system of inputting field trip programmes began to operate online in 2012. As a result, it penetrated the various districts slowly. Also, there is a disparity among districts in the manner and completeness of data entry. In addition, it is difficult to quantify the exact number of field trips that actually took place in each district. Therefore, one needs to treat the numerical data obtained cautiously.

69. In 2000 (when Yossi Sarid of the Meretz Party, then Ehud Barak, served as ministers of education), the goals of State education were revised in several ways with emphasis on social, cultural, and national objectives. State Education Law, “Amendment of Section 2,” October 2, 2000.

70. The word ‘postmodernism’ is shrouded in obscurity and defies thorough definition in many respects. Among the many attempts to define it, we choose to relate to it as a state of multiple identities and an absence of clear rules for appreciation and condemnation. Postmodern thinking is essentially an outgrowth of political thinking because when one traces the way its ideas and realities took shape and evolved, one finds that they are not stable, self-evidently clear, and natural as they are perceived, but rather malleable and replaceable. Source. Rosmarin, “Feminism.”

71. Some see the Israeli presence in sites such as the Cave of the Patriarchs or the Jewish community in Hebron as controversial and provoking and perpetuating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Curricular Programmeme, ‘Kit for Visits to the City of the Patriarchs’. See Ministry of Education, Society and Youth Administration.

72. Kashti, “Minister of Education.”