‘Soon you will go far’: discourse analysis on vocational education policy of Israel

ABSTRACT

This article performs a discourse analysis on the recent interest of the Israeli Ministry of Education in vocational education by examining governmental and organisational texts. This article addresses two key questions. What is the government’s justification for its renewed interest in vocational education? What are its discursive practices to promote vocational education in the context of the current neoliberal discourse on equality and meritocracy? Highlighting three major justifications and discursive practices in the Ministry of Education’s current educational policy, this discursive analysis shows that the policy is related to culture, ethnicity, and class hierarchies in Israel. The analysis also underscores ambiguity as a governmental and organisational tool and the ramifications of the government’s ethnic blindness related to the social construction of a specific reality in vocational education.

KEYWORDS:

• Vocational education
• ambiguity
• educational policy
• strategic blindness
• discursive volatility

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. ‘Tracking’ and ‘tracks’ are the prevailing terms in Israel, especially in its educational system. These terms are used to describe the formal sorting of study majors. These concepts also appear in the written materials we analyse.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation [1253/17].