The Dovrat Report: Transforming Israel's Education System into a Combination of Public Social Assistance and Privatization

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. OECD, Literacy Skills for the World of Tomorrow: Further Results from PISA 2000 (www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/43/9/33690591.pdf), Geneva, 2003, pp. 69, 100, 109. 2. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London, 1973. 3. Kurt Pritzkoleit, Die neuen Herren: Die Mächtigen in Staat und Wirtschaft, Vienna, 1955; Kurt Pritzkoleit, Wem gehört Deutschland: Eine Chronik von Besitz und Macht, Vienna, 1957. 4. Susan Strange, Casino Capitalism, Manchester and New York, 1997. 5. Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents, London, 2002. 6. Esther Alexander, The Power of Equality in the Economy: The Israeli Economy in the 1980s, Tel Aviv, 1990 (in Hebrew). 7. Pritzkoleit, Wem gehört Deutschland: Eine Chronik von Besitz und Macht, p. 304. 8. Marx already showed this in the second half of the nineteenth century. See Karl Marx, Capital (part 3), in Karl Marx and Frederick Engles, Collected Woks (MECW), 50 vols., New York, 1975–2004, Vol. 37, pp. 310, 541–2. 9. Esther Alexander, The Power of Equality in the Economy, p. 135. 10. The findings of the international institute ISI, Thomson published in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz reveal the following picture. ‘From 1998–2002, Israel was in first place in aerospace sciences and astrophysics. The Hebrew University was ranked first among research institutions in this field, while Tel Aviv University was ranked 49 and the Weizmann Institute of Science was ranked 65. In the field of chemistry, the Weizmann Institute is first among Israeli research institutions. Researchers from the Weizmann Institute are ranked 22 worldwide, compared to Tel Aviv University (77), the Hebrew University (83), Bar-Ilan University (116) and Ben Gurion University (136). Weizmann is ranked first among Israeli research institutes in mathematics (27 worldwide), in immunology (28 worldwide), engineering (8 worldwide), molecular biology (26 worldwide), neuroscience (10 worldwide), computer science (9 worldwide) and others as well. In physics, the Weizmann Institute is also the leader in Israel, though ranked only 52 worldwide, with the other Israeli institutions ranked as follows: Tel Aviv University (96), the Technion (107), the Hebrew University (109), Bar-Ilan University (119) and Ben Gurion University (128). In clinical medicine, the situation is far from ideal. The Weizmann Institute is ranked seventh in the world, with the Technion far behind at 137 and Tel Aviv University ranked 142. In the social sciences, Israeli universities are also in a difficult situation. With respect to the impact of researchers on their fields, all are ranked below the top 100 universities in the world.’ Yuval Dror, ‘Stars in Space, Lame in Medicine’, Ha'aretz, 22 July, 2004. 11. For media reports on Dovrat's business involvement in the company Tecnomatix Technologies, a software company located in Herzliya, see Ha'aretz, 5 January, 2005, Financial Section, pp. C1 and C13; The Marker, 23 February, 2005, pp. 30–1. 12. National Task Force for the Advancement of Education in Israel [Dovrat Commission], National Programme for Education [Dovrat Report], State of Israel, January 2005, p. 54. 13. Ibid., p. 18. 14. Ibid., p. 194. Additional informationNotes on contributorsUri ZilbersheidUri Zilbersheid is a senior lecturer in political philosophy at the Max Stern Academic College of Emek Yezreel. He also teaches political philosophy at the Programme for National Security Studies at the University of Haifa.