We seek to look at both the Arab and Jewish communities during this formative period in order to understand how differing groups used the framework of ethnically and linguistically separate schools to advance nationalist aims, define the goals of education, and suggest approaches to emerging political conflicts, both between the Arab and Jewish communities and between each community and the British occupier. How, we ask, do curriculum decisions reflect broader political and cultural discourses? To what extent were Arab and Jewish communal leaders, educators, and planners influenced by contemporary trends in British or other European educational programs? What patterns, concerns or debates were common across the Arab-Jewish ethnic divide? Can we tell a history of education in Palestine that transcends traditional units of analysis and begins to understand the Arab and Jewish schools as part of a linked system responsive to shared (if differently understood) sets of contemporary social realities and methodological pressures.

Fellow panelists would be advanced graduate students in History at UC Berkeley and UCLA.