A Very Special Education: The Israeli Kibbutz

Abstract

Because of the nature of its social or-ganization and educational practices, the Israeli collective settlement known as the Kibbutz has stimulated great interest among behavioral scientists. To an extent far greater than in any other existing community, Kibbutz life is purposely and totally built around the principles of communal ownership of property, cooperative enterprise, comprehensive collective living, and collective education (chinuch meshutaf).2 For the past two years my wife and I have been engaged in a research project on personality development in the second generation reared in a Kibbutz. The Kibbutz we chose for this investigation is the one intensively studied by the anthropologist Melford E. Spiro in 1951-1952.3 A return to this same Kibbutz (called by Spiro Kiryat Yedidim-&dquo;town of friends&dquo;) nearly a generation later provided, we felt, an opportunity for what is rarely possible in a culture and personality study: a longitudinal examination and analysis. This has been made possible by the access provided by Professor Spiro to his original materials. The results of this research will be published in the near future. This paper, meanwhile, is intended as a brief description of the special form of Kibbutz education as practiced today in Kiryat Yedidim.4 We will also review some of the previous research on the Kibbutz and comment on our own aims. 2 For a general description of Kibbutz life in its social, economic, and political spheres, see, e.g.,

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