Progressive Informal Education Interpreted by the Founders of Kibbutz Education in Eretz Israel (Palestine), 1918-1948

Yuval Dror
Oranim & Haifa University, Israel

Yehuda Ron-Polani (Polani), Shmuel Golan, and Mordechai Segal were partners in the creation of Israeli kibbutz schools in the beginning of the 20^th century. Each came from a different kibbutz movement, and each movement had its separate school, but all three educational pioneers shared similar educational principles derived from leading European and American progressive educators. In establishing programs to meet the needs of the collective settlement, they also used informal education practices originating in the youth movements. Their interpretations of progressivism have influenced education in general in Israel, especially Zionist-socialist education under the British Mandate.

Yehuda Ron-Polani
Yehuda Ron-Polani was born in 1881, in South Russia. He received a basic Hebrew education and, as a youth, emigrated to Eretz Yisrael. In 1910, Polani graduated from the Ezra teachers’ college in Jerusalem, which was part of a German-Jewish philanthropic society’s educational network. Hence he was influenced by the educational concepts of contemporary Central Europe.

After teaching elementary school in an agricultural settlement, Polani continued his in-service training from 1912 to 1914 in Leipzig and Zurich. He studied education and handicrafts, and was influenced by Kirshensteiner’s theory. During the First World War, as a Russian citizen, he was forced to leave Palestine, then a Turkish province. He taught in Alexandria and Bulgaria, where he was also exposed to European influences. Up to the mid-1920s, Polani taught in Tel Aviv at the Herzlia Gymnasium, which ran on the central European model. He took part in the establishment of two elementary schools: the Amlani School, run according to the ideas of Kirshensteiner, and the School for Workers’ Children, which was part of the Labor Trend, an autonomous educational framework of the Labor movement.

In 1927 he helped establish the Children’s Society at the foot of Mt. Gilboa. From 1936 to 1940 he taught at this elementary school, run jointly by the kibbutzim of the Jezreel Valley, as well in another non-graded school in the same area.

The children’s society concept was influenced by the theory and experience of Shatzky, and especially of Bernfeld, a student of Freud and Wyneken. Between his two periods in the Jezreel Valley, Polani organized a similarly run school in the children’s village of Ben Shemen. Its principal, Dr. Lehman, followed the Bernfeld approach.

In 1940, he moved to Kibbutz Ramat Yochanan near Haifa. There he founded, and for many years ran, the district education center of the kibbutzim. Over the years, and especially after he settled permanently at Ramat Yochanan, Polani wrote an account of his educational experiments (Ron-Polani, 1965a, 1965b), teaching at the kibbutz teachers’ seminars in Tel Aviv (founded 1939) and at Seminar Oranim (founded 1951). Polani was also active in the establishment of various kibbutz and Israeli educational organizations. He was among the founders of the kibbutz movement education department affiliated with the Israeli Workers’ Party which was the social-democratic party led by Ben Gurion. Polani died in 1984.

Shmuel Golan
Shmuel Golan was born in 1901, in Galicia [Western Poland] in what is now Austria. He received his high school and university education there. As a youth, Golan belonged to the central committee of the left-wing Zionist movement Hashomer Hatzair. In 1920, he emigrated to Palestine and joined the pioneers of Hasmomer Hatzair in founding the Kibbutz Artzi, whose purpose was to establish new collective settlements. To earn his living, Golan did every kind of hard physical labor. In the second half of the 1920s, he was a member of Kibbutz Bet Alfa in the Jezreel Valley and taught with Polani at the Children’s Society.

In 1930, Hashomer Hatzair sent Golan back to Europe. During his three-year service with the youth movement in Berlin, he studied both the psychoanalytic approaches of Freud and Bernfeld. Golan helped to establish a new type of educational institution, the Kibbutz Artzi-Hashomer Hatzair Educational Institute at Kibbutz Mishmar Haemek. This was the first unit in a boarding school system that embodied various European New Education traditions—Makarenko in the Soviet Union as well as the free youth movements of central Europe—and was open to all Israeli graduates of Kibbutz Artzi elementary schools. The Institute was founded in 1931, and from 1933 to 1947, Golan was one of its leading educators.

Golan was very active in the educational and social institutions of his kibbutz movement, which lay to the left on the political map. He was a prominent spokesman for Kibbutz Artzi in Israeli educational institutions, and taught at the kibbutz teachers’ colleges from 1948 until his death in 1960 (Golan 1959; 1965).

Mordechai Segal
Mordechai Segal was born in 1904 in the Russian Ukraine. He studied at a Hebrew school until emigrating to Palestine in 1925. Segal joined the Kibbutz Kfar Giladi in the north and for seven years worked in the vegetable garden there while still remaining involved in education. He also worked in a Jewish orphanage in Poland, and gained a partial university education in philosophy, history, and education in the United States where he first became acquainted with the teachings of John Dewey.

In 1932, Segal was sent to continue his studies in Tel Aviv at the Biological-Educational Institute of Yehoshua Margolin. His scientific studies qualified him to serve as a link between science education and Jewish settlements. The experience expanded his acquaintance with new educational theories from Europe and the United States.

During the next seven years, Segal reshaped teaching methods and developed the special features of the elementary school in Kfar Giladi. He would later define his approach as the "method of processes." At the same time, Segal served on the education committees of the Kibbutz Hameuchad movement, a left wing and Bolshevik movement in its conception. He represented it in institutions of the Labor Trend education together with Polani and Golan, though occasionally he was in educational conflict with them.  

In 1939, Segal founded the Kibbutz Teachers’ College in Tel Aviv and from that time almost until he died in 1991, he was an innovator, a leading teacher and director. Segal, who shaped the institution for over 50 years, was more active than his two associates in crystallizing a theory of education (Segal 1965, 1970). In research, Segal linked kibbutz education to socialist and progressive Zionist concepts. Most of all, Segal linked kibbutz education to Dewey’s educational theories.

An Effective Integration
The approaches of Polani, Golan, and Segal were influenced in various ways by progressive education and the informal education heritage of the youth movement (Schatzker, 1978). On this twofold foundation rested the educational preparation of most teachers in kibbutz schools and in the Labor Trend during the British Mandate.

Integrating these two foundations was necessary not only because of the connections of the three founders and their associates, but also because such links already existed in their European sources.

Bernfeld combined the educational concepts of Freud and Wyneken in his educational institution in Baumgarten (Utley, 1979). Makarenko, familiar to all three, had made similar combinations. New ideas also appeared in additional experiments of the New Education in Europe and the United States (Porat, 1985, 1989). This essay explores six important principles that characterized the educational efforts of Polani, Golan, and Segal.

The Child and the Youth as a Starting Point
The common starting point of all the experiments in progressive education that influenced the founders of kibbutz education was its pedacentricity. It aimed at the highest development of each pupil’s individual abilities. Segal, following Dewey, stated that a school should resolve existing conflicts between an individual and society as well as prepare the individual to fit into society. The youth movements had a similar societal conception, viewing adolescence as a moratorium in which to discover the talents of each young person. Everyone involved in these movements tried to ensure that the young person would find a place in adult society according to his or her abilities. This goal was effected in various ways, among them by evaluating every job equally. Active teaching methods and self-governing institutions of the children’s societies in the schools—characteristics which originated in the youth movements—made it possible for each kibbutz child, through the progressive approach, to achieve according to his own ability. Labor Trend institutions in the city produced a similar but less intensive process.

The Unity of Formal and Informal Education
At the new institutions of education in Europe and the United States, many of them boarding schools, educators thought that the school was insufficient and that supplementary informal activities must be included. The idea of "total" education also characterized the European youth movements which could respond to the unique needs of youth through revolt against adult society and its schools. The ideal of total education was transplanted into the Labor Trend institutions in the city and in the kibbutz through the merging of studies with work and social activities, especially through contact between the school and the youth movement. In those schools, the students studied in the morning and socialized and worked in the afternoon hours, all with the cooperation of the youth movements that met mainly in the evenings. The total life in the kibbutz made inclusive realization possible, over and above even the long school day of city schools.

Student work in service occupations and in agriculture was more vital and necessary than any work experience the city could provide. Indeed, it was essential in the kibbutz community, particularly in boarding schools. Thus, the three founders linked, in the schools they founded and in their writing, the different educational personnel in the kibbutz: teachers, youth group leaders, and the "metaplot" who cared for the children, as well as parents and the educational establishment.

Life In School and Outside
Various approaches stressed the need for contact between the pupils and their immediate and more distant surroundings. These approaches emphasized the importance of imagination and the necessary contact between life in school and real life outside of the classroom. Community education was developed to suit these approaches through two-way contacts between the educational frameworks of the community and the wider society. The approach of the youth movements was based on the view that adolescence is a moratorium between childhood and adulthood, a time when children play in a framework modeled on adult society, the purpose of which is to prepare them for integration into society through experimentation and legitimate trial and error. The leaders of the youth movements wanted, in a changing society, to establish institutions that would prepare their members to create a better learning environment for the future. Kibbutz schools were run by a variety of progressive and informal educational societies, each functioning as an entity.

Segal, in Kibbutz Hameuchad, conceived of a separate school for each kibbutz, one that would emphasize the connection to its specific surroundings, from kindergarten through secondary school. Golan, in Kibbutz Artzi, wanted to bring about a rational Republic of Youth. Here, dormitories were mini-kibbutzim, functioning alongside the adult society. Polani believed in the development of a local children’s society—both formal and informal—but his efforts allowed for both local and national concerns. Children’s societies also developed in the Labor Trend schools in the city but were less all-encompassing in the life of their members.

Active Learning Instruction and Informal Methods
Activity-based instruction was characteristic of progressive educational methods and included group and individual work, research and studies, interdisciplinary methods and American projects and European complexes as well as other features. All these methods were implemented in kibbutz educational establishments and in the Labor Trend schools and were widely replicated elsewhere in Israel during the British Mandate. The basic assumption of child-centered education necessitated teaching and learning methods suited to the individual. This fact was also true of the leadership methods of the youth movements, which aimed to develop the abilities of each member. Except in certain social activities, the didactics of the youth movements stressed indirect education through the use of symbols. These were used instead of statements since statements could be interpreted as sermons, a recipe for resistance in the rebellious youth life stage. These movements educated indirectly through youth experiences and identification with leaders and symbols such as flags, uniforms, and ceremonies.

Over the years, active and informal methods were combined because their aims and nature were similar. These methods were found not only in Labor Trend schools but also especially in the kibbutzim, where educators (encouraged by Polani, Golan, and Segal), mixed methods. Polani developed work approaches in the spirit of Kirshensteiner, and Golan participated in the institutionalization of the integrative subject method in Kibbutz Artzi. Segal encouraged the integrative and individual approach even more by the process method wherein the learning process paralleled real life. All  three methods were taught in the kibbutz teachers’ colleges, and spread beyond the kibbutz and the Labor Trend. The three founders, especially Golan of Hashomer Hatzair, helped to combine the informal tools of the youth movements with the life in the schools.

Apolitical, Non-Party Values Education and "Educational Teaching"
Progressive educators combined the desire for value-free education with social control; they balanced individual value development with the view that society must nevertheless educate for social and even national values. The youth movement was concerned with values education to prepare youth to serve the needs and fight the ills of the local community and the nation. These leaders felt that this goal should be accomplished in an apolitical, non-partisan way. The indirect education of the youth movements and the contact of members with adult educators was done mainly to influence ideological positions. Given the ideologically-oriented Jewish society of the time, especially in Labor Trend and kibbutz education which added Socialism to Zionism, teaching and guidance had to be tied to ideological education. Here we find the term "educational teaching," taken from the European gymnasium and developed in the Zionist-Socialist education to include the primary school.

Despite the initial pursuit of objectivity, however, the step was short and inevitable to political and even party education in the kibbutz schools and in the Zionist-Socialist youth movements. Polani, Golan, and Segal were absorbed with the connection between teaching and guidance in values education in the schools they founded and in the institutions where they worked. They saw the ideal of the social and the rational as a center for kibbutz education and for Zionist-Socialist education as a whole.

Autonomy of Educators and Educated
The genuine closeness between the educator and the educated, to the point of identification, was emphasized in progressive educational institutions. School communities included teachers, pupils, and workers as one unit that collectively decided the way of life in their schools.

Educational youth groups and youth movements were institutionalized in kibbutz schools and in the city schools of the Labor Trend. In addition, these schools set up autonomous teams of teachers who planned the curriculum. In the kibbutz movements, particularly with the inspiration of Golan in Kibbutz Artzi, educators instituted a national movement to guide the educational activities through regular meetings during school holidays. Polani, Segal, and Golan diligently worked on the development of similar autonomous models in the cities as a part of their work in teacher education.

This autonomy over all the educational aspects of the school appears to have made possible the individual student’s development. Education was at the center of activity, and coordinated contact was necessary with the educating society.

Conclusion
The philosophies and practices of Polani, Golan, and Segal almost completely paralleled the principles of progressive and informal education. The sources of European and American influence were integrated into Israeli reality and coalesced in the six basic principles explicated above. This combination of progressive and informal principles has continued to be implemented in various ways in kibbutz and other schools. Current practice combined with contemporary theories and research regarding the centrality of the pupil help link educational factors, formal and informal education, the community school, active and cooperative learning, values education and the autonomy of the educators and the educated.

Without a doubt, the combination of the principles presented above, derived from the example of kibbutz education during the British Mandate in Eretz Israel (Palestine), continues to be relevant even today (see Sutherland, 1988; Kohlberg & Higgings, 1987; Dror & Bar-Lev, 1992).

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