When the GERM Hosts the Antidote: The Surprising New Birth of Israel's Anti-GERM Pre-K Policy

In May 2016, the director of the Preschool Education Department in the Ministry of Education (MOE) was presented with the conclusions and recommendations for implementation of a change in policy for early childhood... [ view full abstract ]

In May 2016, the director of the Preschool Education Department in the Ministry of Education (MOE) was presented with the conclusions and recommendations for implementation of a change in policy for early childhood education.The proposals summarized a change process involving the participation of all early childhood education inspectors, academics, local authority representatives, and representatives of the teaching staff. The broad scope of public stakeholders participation, the great trust placed in them for this process and the creative experimental educational methods used to design the policy formation process are anti-GERMian characteristics that emerged during the work process, indicating that an essential shift had occurred. But it was not only the method of work on the formulation of the policy that had anti-GERMian characteristics; it was also the content of the policy decisions themselves. Among other things, they sought to promote pedagogies of the whole child and focus on social and emotional aspects of assessment, at the expense of ones that mainly focus on quantitative achievements in reading, writing and sciences, as was the case in many GERM policies. From a very distinctly neoliberal early childhood education system there began a clear noticeable movement towards an anti-GERMian policy reinforcing the public aspect of the system in the social democratic sense of the term.