Mothering, Education and Culture

Russian, Palestinian and Jewish Middle-Class Mothers in Israeli Society

Deborah Golden, Lauren Erdreich, Sveta Roberman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781137536303
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137536310
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

This book is an ethnographically-informed interview study of the ways in which middle-class mothers from three Israeli social-cultural groups – immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Palestinian Israelis and Jewish native-born Israelis – share and differ in their understandings of a 'proper' education for their children and of their role in ensuring this. The book highlights the importance of education in contemporary society, and argues that mothers' modes of engagement in their children's education are formed at the junction of class, culture and social positioning.  It examines how cultural models such as intensive mothering, parental anxiety, individualism, and 'concerted cultivation' play out in the lives of these mothers and their children, shaping different ways of participating in the middle class. The book will be of interest to anthropologists and sociologists studying mothering, education, parenting, gender, class and culture, to readers curious about daily life in Israel, and to professionals working with families in a multicultural context.

© The Author(s) 2018

Deborah Golden, Lauren Erdreich and Sveta RobermanMothering, Education and Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53631-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Deborah Golden¹  , Lauren Erdreich^{2, 4}   and Sveta Roberman^{3, 5}  

(1)

Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

(2)

Levinsky College of Education, Tel Aviv, Israel

(3)

Gordon Academic College of Education, Haifa, Israel

(4)

Beit Berl Academic College, Kfar Saba, Israel

(5)

Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

 

 

Deborah Golden (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

 

Lauren Erdreich

Email: [email protected]

 

Sveta Roberman

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

This study began on a sunny summer day over coffee and conversation between two anthropologists—Deborah and Lauren —a conversation that turned into the first of many, and was subsequently joined by a third anthropologist, Sveta . At the time of that first conversation, Lauren had moved to the town in Israel where Deborah was living with her son, then 13 years old. As Lauren’s daughter toddled around the table, we discussed our past work and interests. Sometime later, Deborah called Lauren with an idea. When we met this time, Deborah brought with her a stack of fliers that had been shoved into her postbox—advertisements for after-school activities, private tutoring, and leisure activities for mothers and children. ‘Let’s do something about this—about how mums are inundated with educational goods and services that tell them how they should be taking care of their kids,’ she suggested. This hit home with Lauren , who had just given birth to her second daughter and had spent a lot of time checking out possibilities for child care for both daughters. The town in which we lived offered many options—for a price. We noticed almost immediately how our particular locale shaped our experience as mothers—the abundance of educational goods and services required that we make choices among them, choices that were decisions about what sort of mothers we are or would like to be.

From the perspective of this study, mothering must be understood in relation to perceptions and practices of what constitutes a proper education for children—since the two are inextricably interwoven. In today’s world, education plays an increasingly important role in equipping children with knowledge and practical and social skills , as well as defining social location and potential social mobility . With the onset of industrial society and the burgeoning of nation-states, education of children was removed from the home and replaced by a formal system of compulsory schooling . Schooling was deemed necessary to adequately prepare children with basic skills, knowledge , values and sentiments requisite for a future citizen in the modern nation-state (Gellner 1983) and was put in the hands of professional educators. In this form of social organization, the family fulfilled a supporting role; in this supporting role women were viewed as the most appropriate caretakers of home and as primarily responsible for the children’s upbringing and education.

Education—within school and without—is a major arena in which parents—primarily through the gendered work of mothers —reproduce their own class and cultural sensibilities. Although family life has undergone changes, and men are increasingly involved in the upbringing of their children, recent decades have seen the ‘transformation of women’s domestic labour to include extensive educational work in the home’ (Reay 2005a, 113); mothers take prime responsibility for the ‘complementary education work’ around schooling (Griffith and Smith 2005) and for decision-making relating to educational matters (Ball 2003). Perceptions and practices of mothering are culturally embedded and produced in response to changing requirements and expectations of what mothers can and should be doing in relation to their children’s education and the demands produced by educational institutions. In seeking to ensure a proper education for their children, mothers are obliged not only to make decisions regarding their children’s schooling but also to negotiate a market of ‘extra-curricular’ ideas, goods and services, all of which hold out the promise of ensuring a proper education for the children. This negotiation requires knowledge, financial resources and time—putting the middle class at a distinct advantage and, in turn, positing middle-class mothering as something to be emulated and as a widely disseminated cultural model of what is considered to be proper mothering .

In a landmark study entitled The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, published in 1996, Sharon Hays coined the term ‘intensive mothering’ to describe middle-class motherhood—a ‘gendered model that advises mothers to expend a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money in raising their children’ (Hays 1996, x). With its roots in western middle-class sensibilities and values, this model has evolved into a dominant cultural model and benchmark for proper mothering among other mothers elsewhere (Arendell 2000; Ennis 2014; Faircloth et al. 2013; Lee et al. 2014; O’Reilly 2014). But how far could this construct take us in understanding diverse social realities? We wondered how middle-class mothers , far removed from the context of the American mothers who formed the basis of Hays’ study, interpret and implement ‘intensive mothering’? How are these perceptions and practices elaborated in ways of educating their children?

This study looks at how women reflect upon and make sense of this task. Grounded in an approach that brings together ideas of class , culture and social positioning , our study is a comparative, ethnographically informed interview study of Israeli middle-class mothers’ understandings and modes of engagement in their children’s education. Focusing on middle-class mothers from three Israeli social-cultural groups —Russian immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Palestinian Israelis and Jewish native-born Israelis¹—the book examines the ways in which these mothers both share and differ in their understandings of a proper education for their children and of their task as mothers in ensuring this. Propelled throughout by a comparative thrust, our study is guided by four main questions:

• What are mothers’ understandings of a proper education for their children and of their role in ensuring this?
• What perceptions and practices of mothering and education do women share and in what ways do they differ?
• How do class, culture and social positioning conjoin in shaping perceptions and practices of educating children and of what it means to be a mother?
• How do global discourses about proper education and competent mothering interweave with local concerns and possibilities?

The three groups of mothers in our study currently participate in the Israeli middle class , albeit with different relationships to major social institutions and resources, as well as access to educational goods and services . Note that we use the verb ‘participate’ in the middle class advisedly, rather than the word ‘belong’, which is both more fixed and more passive. The use of the term ‘participation’ gives a sense of the ongoing work of class and its forward-moving thrust. In a discussion of the constituents of class, Conley (2008, 370) highlights what he calls the imagining of ‘possibility, expectation, probability’. This process of ‘envisioning possibility step by step’ (2008, 370) is particularly apt for describing and understanding the ways by which mothers seek, over time, and through ensuring what they view as a proper education for their children, to ensure the future social positioning of their children, even as this may not be fully in place in the present moment. Moreover, all the women in our study have the economic means and social and cultural capital with which to seek out and take advantage of educational resources. Under these circumstances, in which these women are relatively less constrained, we assumed that cultural underpinnings of what is deemed to be proper mothering would be more easily discerned. That is, by holding class constant across the three groups, we sought to allow issues related to culture and social positioning to come to the fore. As the study shows, mothers in each group share certain ideas about mothering; yet their modes of engaging with their children’s education reflect distinct, but changing, cultural models of both mothering and education, as well as being shaped by their different, and evolving social positionings in Israeli society.

© The Author(s) 2018

Deborah Golden, Lauren Erdreich and Sveta RobermanMothering, Education and Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53631-0_2

Begin Abstract

2. Setting the Scene—Theory, Context, Method

Deborah Golden¹ , Lauren Erdreich^{2, 4} and Sveta Roberman^{3, 5}

(1)

Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

(2)

Levinsky College of Education, Tel Aviv, Israel

(3)

Gordon Academic College of Education, Haifa, Israel

(4)

Beit Berl Academic College, Kfar Saba, Israel

(5)

Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

Deborah Golden (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Lauren Erdreich

Email: [email protected]

Sveta Roberman

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In this chapter, we outline the theoretical, contextual and methodological knowledge that sets the scene for the empirical findings to be presented in subsequent chapters. The chapter comprises four main sections. In the first (‘Conceptual underpinnings’), we present the conceptual underpinnings of our study—the ideas and concepts that inform our understanding of the issues at hand; in the second (‘The Israeli context’), we provide some background information on Israeli society necessary for making sense of and contextualizing o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Setting the Scene—Theory, Context, Method
• 3. En Route
• 4. The ‘Well-Invested’ Child
• 5. Homing In
• 6. A Comparative Look
• 7. Conclusion: Envisioning Possibilities
• Backmatter