Israel Mounting Programs to Deal with Culturally Disadvantaged Children

Israel and the United States share the problem of establishing integration in their school systems as a means of raising the educational levels of culturally deprived children. But while American efforts to cope with the problem are primarily a defensive move on the part of a majority dealing with a minority, in Israel the entire society is identified with the problem. These relationships were brought out by American and Israeli educators, sociologists and psychologists participating in a two day conference on “Opportunities for the disadvantaged,” organized by the Hebrew University National Council of Jewish Women Center for Research in Education for the Disadvantaged. According to Hanoch Smith, head of the Labor Ministry’s manpower planning authority, 66 percent of Israeli children aged 4-10 are from sections of the community usually characterized as culturally deprived. These are usually children of immigrant families from North Africa and Asian countries, Smith criticized the government’s policy of population dispersal under which most new towns and settlements are populated by the educationally weaker elements, creating a surplus of unskilled persons and built-in unemployment problems. Dr. Chaim Adler, a sociologist who heads the Center’s research program, said that integrated education meant the creation of a common framework of education for the entire school population as proposed in reforms now being worked out with regard to junior high schools in Israel.

A recent project to investigate the effects of enriched educational methods on homogeneous and heterogeneous pre-kindergarten classes indicated however that improvements were related more to enriched curriculum than to the factor of integration. Better results were obtained in classes in which the “established” children outnumbered the deprived by two-to-one than in the homogeneous classes composed entirely of culturally disadvantaged children. Prof, James Coleman of Johns Hopkins University said the results in the U.S. showed that the culturally disadvantaged had a better chance of higher achievement by contact with the more advantaged group because it was hoped that integration would serve to bridge social chasms. Prof. Coleman said that Israel has succeeded better at integrating her culturally disadvantaged than the U.S. because in Israel, cultural integration is understood as a matter of common identity, values, beliefs and attitudes in society. On the other hand, he said, the U.S. has had more success than Israel in bringing about the participation of all levels of society in occupations and professions, politics and government. Prof. Coleman warned that Israel cannot continue to neglect social integration because with a lessening of tension associated with security problems, the country’s cultural unity may split asunder without the unity existing today as a basis on which to work.