The ballot box enters the classroom: the real test of the education system begins now | Prof. Avi Levi

In about two weeks, Israeli students will begin the school year, at a time that marks the entry into the final stretch of the election campaign. They are expected to enter the school gates while a political storm is raging outside, and when unprecedented technological capabilities are added to the familiar campaign tools.

Here, an educational and cognitive gap is created: the civics curriculum sets worthy goals—familiarization with different worldviews, understanding the political system, distinguishing between facts and opinions, recognizing the balance between the individual and society, developing critical thinking, and the ability to conduct a respectful discourse even on controversial issues. However, the political reality outside the classroom is different. Instead of an orderly discussion between ideologies, platforms, and complex arguments, the digital feed on social networks competes for seconds of attention through short, repetitive, and personalized messages.

While the student in the classroom learns how to build and examine an argument, outside the school walls operates a manipulative and sophisticated system that seeks to evoke an immediate emotional response—creating identification with a certain camp based on markers of identity and belonging, arousing anger, anxiety, or disgust towards the other camp, and increasing the noise inside the echo chamber.

As the ability to shape the student's consciousness becomes more sophisticated, the degree of the educator's responsibility to maintain the independence of their thinking increases. In an era of information overload, where fabricated content becomes harder to identify and algorithms reward precisely those messages that trigger high emotional engagement, the student needs more than ever a figure who will provide them with tools to decode and judge the information that reaches them:

To stop before adopting a position or sharing a message, to clarify who created it and for what purpose, to look for the source, to identify what was omitted from the full picture, and to distinguish between an attempt at persuasion through argument and an attempt at emotional manipulation.

Whether we like it or not, the peak of the election campaign will penetrate the school. The role of the educator becomes more significant and complex than ever: to teach students how to navigate within a stormy and complicated reality in which so many factors are trying to act upon their minds. The school must serve as an incubator that gives students the skills to doubt, to check, to ask questions, to identify manipulations, and above all, to learn how to disagree sharply without turning those who think differently into an enemy.

An education system is not measured by its ability to raise students who think the same, but by the ability to raise young people who are not afraid to hold a position, but also are not afraid to examine it, and who know how to argue without dismissing the opinions of the other. The elections will end in one day, but the language, habits, and patterns of thinking that we will instill in the students will remain with them for many years after. The real educational test is not in the type of ballot they will cast in the ballot box one day, but what the value-based backpack of the graduates will contain at the end of high school.

The author is the president of the Shaanan Academic College of Education in Haifa and a member of the Professors for National Resilience circle.