Progressive and Informal Classrooms and Pedagogies

Abstract

Zionist and Israeli (Jewish) education served as a crossroad to progressive European and American integrated and eclectic influences because most teachers and counselors of the Zionist youth movement, many of whom became teachers, immigrated to Israel from Europe, some of them through the USA, where they were influenced by two educational sources that developed parallel and integrated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, mainly in Europe: progressive education and youth movements. The connection between the leading teachers and Europe continued throughout World War I and the days of the British Mandate in Israel, and even after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, European influences persisted, and American influences increased.

The first section of the chapter will be devoted to a general view of Progressivism in Europe (as well as the youth movements that have integrated to it) and the USA. The second section presents case studies of progressive schools and kindergartens, leading teachers and progressive eclectic pedagogic in the Zionist education and the post state education, linking them to the leading figures from the European and American progressive education movement. These will be detailed in four waves of Zionist and Israeli progressivism, examining them in terms of theory, policy, practice – and the training of education field personnel that combined theory and practice. In the third section, we will present comparative global analyses of various case studies around the world, critical conclusions about the tidal waves of progressivism in Israel and abroad. And in the fourth, new methodological and historiographical directions of thought will be proposed for the future study of this field.