Multicultural Education vs. Implicit and Explicit Ethnocentric Education: Text Analysis of a Contemporary Israeli Value Education Program

Abstract

In the year 2000, Israel purportedly adopted a multicultural educational policy. It replaced the covert assimilation policy, which was referred to as ‘the integration policy’. The aim of the present study was to analyse the contemporary Israeli program of value education. Using the method of content analysis, the present study sought to determine whether the syllabi of the contemporary program reflect the adoption of a multicultural educational policy, or whether they produce only multicultural rhetoric. The findings reveal that the program reflected mainly the pluralistic approach while still maintaining traces of ethnocentric rhetoric of certain syllabi in the program.

Keywords

• assimilation
• educational policy
• israel
• multiculturalism