World culture and social justice in a divided society: evaluations of Israeli Jewish and Arab teachers and students

ABSTRACT

Using the Israeli case, our study delves into teachers’ and students’ notions of social justice, exploring how they are shaped by both world culture trends and local conditions. We first identify social justice notions in the world culture perspective and Israeli society. Then, we empirically examine how these notions are understood by educational agents – teachers and students – across sectors that mirror Israeli society’s major divide: Jewish and Arab-Palestinian. Findings suggest that educational agents and ethnonational affiliation play a major role in recreating national heritages and the different ways in which they understand social justice their lives.

KEYWORDS:

• World culture
• educational globalisation
• social justice
• teachers
• students
• Israel

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Helene Hogri for her editorial assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The equality principle disregards personal traits or performance as bases of distribution, thus guaranteeing each recipient an equal share (Eckhoff 1974). The need principle is similar to equality because it furthers collective concerns, such as maximization of welfare (Schwartz 1975), but it also takes into account personal traits related to needs. In comparison, the equity principle promotes the highest degree of inequality because it is based on specific personal traits, such as effort, contribution to society and talent, that promote status differences (Berger et al. 1983; Reis 1984).

2 These percentages refer to mainstream Israeli groups, excluding ultra-Orthodox Jews and Bedouin Arabs, who are very socioeconomically disadvantaged.

3 For a detailed historical account of civic education in the heterogeneous Israeli society, see Ichilov, Salomon, and Inbar (2005).

4 The deprivation index is an administrative measure based on socioeconomic and demographic (center/periphery) properties of the school’s student population and serves as the basis for extra resource allocation to schools.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Israel Science Foundation [grant number 568/09]. Moreover, it was conducted in the framework of a comprehensive project on teachers’ conceptions of citizenship education in Israeli public schools. The project, funded by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, was led by Hanan Alexander and Halelli Pinson.