Paper short abstract:

The involvement of the army in education in Israel is an interesting study case for the analysis of civil-military relations.This paper explores this involvement from the perspective of teachers and shows their potential to be the focal point of militarization or de-militarization in education.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper is in the intersection of militarism, teacher's education and civic education. Via the Israeli case, I aim to present a discussion of the possible role of teachers in the face of the growing involvement of the military in education systems. At the center of this paper are the perspectives of Israeli teachers towards the military's attempts to participate in school work regarding national and civic education.

Since 2005, the Israeli Ministry of Education, together with the army, has expressed concern regarding the decline in motivation of young Israelis to serve in the army. This apprehension has been mobilized into educational programs that aim to help increase the solidarity with the army, and to enhance inducement of students towards meaningful service. This research aims to understand why and how teachers cooperate with these programs. This is a qualitative research that uses an interpretive-phenomenological approach to analyze the perceptions of teachers towards the educational activities held by the army in schools. The analysis of in-depth interviews with twenty teachers suggests a pendulum of pedagogical strategies, all aim to deal with the fusion of militaristic values in school curriculum. The analysis suggests that teachers can serve as an instrumental factor in the militarization or de-militarization of education settings and that the way they cope with this (im)balance of civil - military values in school is significant in understanding the mechanism of the entanglement of military and educational domains in a democratic society.