Am I or can I be a citizen of the world?

Examining the possibility of cosmopolitan-patriotic education in Israel

Eran Gusacov

Abstract

Questions concerning the ethics of patriotism, the essentiality of patriotic education and the character and the ways in which to implement such an education have been raised a number of times over the last few years in the relevant professional literature. It appears as if a discussion about the need for patriotic education is relevant not only for the Western countries, which have many nationalities and cultures, but also especially for the State of Israel, whose social cohesion is being weakened and there is a fear that the different factions in the society are unable to work together.

This paper takes a much-needed first step for a systematic study of the issue of education for patriotism, which I believe is required by the Ministry of Education in Israel.

Here I probe the cosmopolitan side of what I see as a patriotic continuum ranging from chauvinism or jingoism declaring "my country right or wrong"; to the differentiation between "robust" or "strong patriotism" regarding communitarian patriotism concentrates on the community or the nation within which one learns and internalizes morality, and "moderate patriotism" balancing between, on one hand the concern for the well-being of the country and the national interests, and on the other hand the universal point of view and its morality; to constitutional patriotism that supplants primordial cultural loyalties with a political identity embodied in the constitution of a democratic state and its institutions; to cosmopolitan patriotism which stands in the center of this paper.

The paper examines the justification and the practicability of a cosmopolitan-patriotic education as a substitute for a unique local patriotic education in contemporary Israel. Its main argument is that cosmopolitan patriotism education is inadequate for the current societal and political atmosphere in Israel. It starts with a description of ideas common to a variety of cosmopolitan stances. Then it adds a flavor of specific relevant Zionistic-Jewish-Israeli points of view regarding the possibility of cosmopolitanism in Israeli state's schools. This addition will be concentrating on educational ideas I derived from my interpretation of some cosmopolitan thoughts of three thinkers: Theodor Herzl, who envisioned the Zionist state but did not live to see his dream come true; Emanuel Levinas who lived in France but still expressed some ethical demands for the State of Israel, and Ilan Gur-Zeev, an Israeli philosopher of education.

The last part of the paper discusses critically the possibility of adopting cosmopolitan-patriotic education in Israel based on those stances. The conclusion of the discussion is that despite the good intentions of the cosmopolitan ideas, in contemporary Israeli reality these ideas cannot practically replace the local patriotic education, and at the most can be used as regulative idea for a "soft" patriotic education.