Gender segregation in Israeli schools a social 'disaster'
In an interview with Al-Monitor, former education minister, professor Amnon Rubinstein, criticizes both government and opposition for neglecting the issue of higher education accessibility as a tool to narrow social gaps.
Professor Amnon Rubinstein, a former minister of education and recipient of the Israel Prize for Law, told Al-Monitor:
"I find it very strange that providing the weaker sectors of the society access to higher education as a way of reducing gaps rarely ever comes up for discussion in the Knesset. It really bothers me. Why is it that the child of a wealthy lawyer or doctor, who was accepted to university due to his high grades, because he attended the best schools, had private tutors and was sent to learn English in a 'summer school' — can study in a subsidized institute, while an Ethiopian student, whose grades are low because he doesn’t come from a well-to-do background, is unable to attend the same university and ineligible for financial support? I haven’t been able to get an answer to this question from either the Ministry of Education or the Finance Ministry because there is no answer that would explain this disparity."
This statement is the outcome of decades in Israeli academia and an illustrious career in politics as both a member of the Knesset and a minister. Most of all, it reflects his cohesive worldview, which focuses on the importance of social justice in education and the legal system.
Long before the summer of 2011, when the social protests became a part of our lives, Rubinstein managed to see the inequity and injustice from the heart of Israel’s well-to-do Ashkenazi academic elite. As minister of education in the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s second government, he spearheaded the revolution in higher education, which fractured the hegemony of the academic-university establishment, and enabled students with lower scores on their matriculation and psychometric exams to obtain a higher education.
