The Portrait of the Graduate

The leading actors and networks of the modern Jewish and Hebrew institutions in Ottoman Palestine aspired to create a revolutionary change for the next generation. The transnational history of schools illustrates the process of transmitting pedagogical ideas and their implementation. The implementation processes entailed three central factors: the goals of the teachers and the networks, the local conditions, and the growing Hebrew nationalist ideology. The three educational networks shaped three modern Jewish graduates. They all had the civilizing mission as a common basis. The degree to which the networks copied and processed ideas from elsewhere varied. The Hebrew educational institutions sought to create or shape the new Hebrew graduate to replace their parents’ generation in Eastern Europe. The Hebrew secondary school education was based on two central foundations. One was a modern curriculum and the other a local, Hebrew-national one. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Hebrew schools sought to strengthen the educational goals that promote loyalty and attachment to the place and the vision of a new society. This local form of empowerment diminished the power of the transfer and internalization of European cultural models to some degree.