English was a required subject in nearly all Zionist schools in Palestine during the Mandate Period. How did institutions passionately committed to promoting Hebrew, the proclaimed mother tongue, and largely autonomous in their curriculum decisions, justify their choice to devote classroom hours to this pursuit? Part of a larger study of language politics in the pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine, my paper argues that the Yishuv grappled with how to balance a fervent commitment to a local national language with the need to gain the linguistic skills to operate on the local colonial and broader international stages. My research shows, however, that alongside purely instrumental justifications for English study, educators promoted the idea that England and the English embodied exemplary values that should be imbibed by an emerging Hebrew society that imagined itself as fundamentally European. England, seen as a bastion of democracy, civic stability, and national normalcy, could offer lessons for a populace anxious about its apparent national abnormality and lack of modern sensibilities. The English language could thus, paradoxically, be construed as a conduit for values understood to be essentially "Hebrew." At the same time, obsessive obsequiousness to English values caused alarm for many who saw Zionism as precisely a movement to escape Europe. The paper seeks to situate Zionist language policies within the broader history of English instruction during the first half of the twentieth century. The Yishuv was articulating its pedagogical approaches during a period in which the British were revising their own instructional methods in light of a new interest in modern language study and a growing need to teach English in the colonies. Indeed, some of the textbooks that resulted from Indian experiments were used in Jewish schools in Palestine. Far from passive recipients of curricula, Yishuv educators--fashioning themselves as disciples of the newest European pedagogical methods--engaged with and modified these materials for their own use. The paper replies on protocols from Zionist education committee meetings, teachers' bulletins, school newspaper articles, and textbooks, along with the records of the British Council, which funded some English study in Palestine beginning in the late 1930s. In focusing attention on the English language, I shed light on an object of Zionist attention largely obscured by a scholarly focus on Jewish immigrant languages (particularly Yiddish) and a tendency to downplay the significance of the British mandatory context in the development of Zionist cultural and educational politics.

At the outset of the British Mandate, Zionist and Arab national elites in Palestine embarked on the vital task of educating, and thereby also creating, new national subjects. New schools were established for this purpose by British, Zionist and private interests, but the fact remained that a significant number of Palestine's children continued to be educated in the traditional religious schools, the qutab and the heder, respectively. Through an analysis of representations of these two institutions in the writings of Arab and Zionist national leaders, my paper addresses the dynamics that characterized relations between "modern" nationalist elites--who were well aware of pedagogy's central role in shaping national consciousness--and the network of religious schools that predated these nationalist agendas. My paper addresses a number of questions related to religious schooling in the context of a rapidly modernizing and urgently nationalizing Palestine: How did Jewish and Arab nationalist leaders regard the systems of religious schooling To what extent and through what means did they attempt to influence the traditional curriculum of the heder and the qutab Were the heder and the qutab regarded as appropriate sites for applying the modernizing interventions, scientific management and reformist agendas propagated in other spheres by both nationalist elites and the colonial governmentg I argue that religious schools presented a formidable ideological challenge to both Jewish and Arab leaders, who, on one hand sought to ground their projects in a discourse of religious legitimacy, and on the other, attempted to reform religious schools for the production of "modern" national subjects. In addressing these questions, my paper will contribute to our understanding of education during this formative period in Palestinian history and enter into broader theoretical debates regarding religion in the public sphere, secularism and the imperatives of nationalist modernity. Finally, this paper is theoretically grounded in two approaches: First, in undertaking a comparative study of Mandate Palestine, I hope to contribute to the small but growing number of studies that resist the urge to treat Palestine's Jewish and Arab communities in isolation. Second, my hope is that a study of the role played by religious education in the context of greater national projects will further jeopardize the clear boundaries dividing the religious from the secular and the traditional from the modern.

The Palestinian-Arab scout movement has received very little attention in the existing literature. My paper, representing findings of a study in its early stages on youth in Mandatory Palestine, will point to three aspects of the Palestinian scout movement during the Mandate. It will outline the organizational development of the movement. It will reconstruct various aspects of scouting life as they were experienced by Palestinian-Arab youths. Furthermore, it will examine scouting as the focus around which a culture of nationalism was produced. With the establishment of the British Mandate in 1920, Palestinian-Arab troops were put under the country-wide Palestine Scout Association, sanctioned by the Mandatory government and headed by British officials for the purpose of shaping a loyal colonial subject. Much to the detriment of the Mandate authorities and its Department of Education, within a decade, national and local Palestinian political leaders were involved in the creation of an independent scout movement which was more in tune with the national aspirations of the Arabs. The story of Arab scouting in Palestine appears firstly as that of an indigenous opposition to a foreign colonial regime. In this paper, I will also point to the potency of scouting as an agent for socialization and show that by taking part in scouting activities, young members of various ages were exposed, quite possibly for the first time in the history of the country, to a vast array of disciplinary tactics, nationalistic culture, and recreational practices. Beyond shaping a national and gender identity for its members, the scout movement also became a visible component of the Palestinian public sphere. Indeed the scouts' activities were not confined to the school, monastery, mosque or camp. As it received wide coverage in the daily press, scouts' participation in parades, official ceremonies, and demonstrations solidified identification with local communities, parent organizations, and the Palestinian nation. The paper relies on Zionist, British and Palestinian-Arab archival material, daily press, memoir excerpts, and the Palestinian scouting booklets, as well as referring to social science literature and historical examples on the subject of scouting in the West and the colonies. The story of the Palestinian Arab Scouts, so far hardly considered, will recreate an essential aspect of life for ordinary Palestinians; local leaders, educators, young men and children, who, despite internal divisions and external pressures, sought to mold a new culture for their society in times of dramatic shifts.

Although education is often discussed in histories of the British Mandate for Palestine, it is rarely the main focus. Education, with few exceptions is described merely as a tool for the repression or development of nationalism, background for a case study of how Palestinians should be educated or an illustration of the failed British Colonial project. The discourse of nationalism and the question of who can, or should be blamed or commended for the Israeli victory and Palestinian defeat in 1948 dominates historical accounts of Palestinian education. The daily interactions and perceptions of those who experienced this education become subsumed under the weight of these linear narratives, preventing a cultural history of Palestinian participants from emerging. An examination of the category of teacher illuminates the views of those who sought to impose, transmit or modify culture within the colonial framework as well as the consequences of these actions. My paper will focus on how the ideal of "the good teacher" was constructed and adapted from a multiplicity of Arab Palestinian and British viewpoints during the course of the Mandate. Despite the imposition of a quintessentially British colonial inspectorate, and its corresponding push for bureaucratization and professionalization, Palestinian educators, villagers, students and even the inspectors themselves espoused various views of what granted a teacher legitimate authority in the classroom. Educational qualifications, character, morals, pedagogical methods, social standing, age and gender all played a role in shaping of the category of teacher. Through a close reading of teacher's personnel files, including inspectors' reports, teachers' and villagers' petitions, medical records, annual reports and other archival materials I will trace the concept of the "good teacher" from the inception of the Mandate in 1922 through its dissolution in 1948. Rather than passively accepting the roles prescribed to them by administrators, teachers used the language and boundaries of British authorities in order to redefine and contest their position within the educational system and their own communities. Through their experience of the British-run educational bureaucracy, Arab teachers articulated a type of modern subjectivity; protesting and engaging with the frameworks imposed by the colonial government and Mandate society. This paper will address not only the cultural and social impact of the Mandate educational system on the Arab teachers who filled its ranks, but also how these teachers and the villages they served pushed back, defining the "good teacher" according to local needs and criteria.