Music Everywhere: Overt and Covert, Official and Unofficial Early Childhood Music Education Policies and Practices in Israel

Early childhood music education in Israel is important for policymakers and practitioners. Various programs, official and nonofficial, coexist in chaotic and unrelated ways. Recently, the Ministry of Education published a music curriculum for children ages three to six, which dictates the musical repertoire-mainly Western art music and Hebrew songs. Considering that current Israeli society is highly complex in its heterogeneous, multicultural makeup, this curriculum does not reflect or represent it. This framework is common to most of the initiatives. The roots of such a framework are found in the work the immigrant founders of Modern Hebrew education in Israel (early twentieth century) began, developing the New Hebrew culture in what has become a Western-oriented country situated in the Middle East.