ECONOMIC SOCIALIZATION IN THE KIBBUTZ

This study compared the economic understanding and attitudes of children living in the city with those living in a kibbutz, collective villages where an extreme socialist lifestyle is practised and preached. The differences in the answer patterns of the urban and kibbutz children were not very large, but the pattern was clear, and in keeping with the dominant ideology in both places: socialist in the kibbutz, middle-class capitalist in the city. Background The study: kibbutz versus town What are the deter~n~ts of a child’s social underst~ding? Previ-ous authors have emphasized different factors. According to Jahoda (1984), children will tend to interpret information about economics in terms of the rules of which they have personal understanding. Only by liberating themselves from the interpersonal norms will they come to understand economic systems. The collective representations in society at large are no less im-portant. Children’s emerging views result from interweaving between their intellectual development and traditions of thought in their en-vironment (Connell 1971). The Israeli society harbors two distinct politico-economical currents. There is the older socialist strand of which the kibbutz is the purest product, and the more recent capitalist, entrepreneurial spirit. The kibbutz is a fertile ground for studying these factors. Children growing up in the kibbutz live in a socialist island surrounded by