Paper short abstract:

This paper offers a look at an educational program for adults, in which participants hike for two months across the INT. I show how the temporal conditioning of this program creates a unification of life stages, so that young adults and newly retired adults are placed in a single social category.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I analyze the meeting between adults in different life stages in a two-month-long educational hike, and argue that the discourse about time and temporality in this project has important ramifications to the dynamics between learners of different ages. I show how the project is set up as an intense “time off” from the “normal” life course, in a way that allows learners in certain life stages to take part more than others. This, in turn, creates a unification of these life stages, the most prominent being the meeting and mutual learning of newly retired adults, and those fresh out of military and national service in Israel.

This argument is based on ethnographic fieldwork in two consecutive years with an educational hike from the south of Israel/Palestine to its north. Built as a program for adults, this hike includes daily discussion groups, lectures and ceremonies. The hike is organized in commemoration of fallen Israeli soldiers, and although professed to be apolitical, this almost exclusively Jewish hike across the land has a clear nationalist agenda.

I reveal how part of the means for meeting the educational and pedagogical goals and agendas of this project is by intentionally designing the temporal experience of the participants on the hike. I show how, in this ethnographic case, discourse around time and life stages becomes part of a unifying, ultra-nationalist message, thus drawing lines between theories of time, life course, nationalism, pedagogy and adult education.