Education
Israel’s educational expenditures comprise 6.9% of its GDP (2004), placing Israel 25th out of 182 on the CIA World Factbook’s country comparison of educational expenditures as a percent of GDP.
23.9% of Israel’s adult population (age 25+) has achieved a low attainment level of education, 33.1% has achieved a medium attainment level of education, and 39.7% has achieved a high attainment level of education. Israel’s literacy rate is 97.1% (2004 est.)
Israeli schools are divided into four tracks: public, state-run schools, state-funded yeshivas, Arab schools, and bilingual schools for both Jewish and Arab children. Secondary education prepares students for matriculation exams known as Bagrut. If a student passes, he or she receives a matriculation certificate.
Many Jewish schools in Israel have highly developed special education programs for disabled children, libraries, computers, science laboratories, and film editing studios.
Typically, after a student graduates, he or she will be conscripted into the Israel Defense Forces, Israel Border Police, or Israel Prison Service, although most Arabs are exempt. A student may, however, request to be drafted at a later date to study at a college or university, or a school known as a Mechina, which prepares them for military or national service. Those who study in a university at this stage do so under a contract in which the Army will pay for their Bachelor's degree, but will extend their service by 2–3 years. Universities generally require a number of matriculation units, a certain grade point average, and a good grade on the Psychometric Entrance Test. Israel currently has eight universities, and a number of smaller colleges. According to Webometrics, six Israeli universities are among the top 100 universities in Asia.
Read more about this topic: Standard Of Living In Israel
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
—H.G. (Herbert George)
“A good education ought to help people to become both more receptive to and more discriminating about the world: seeing, feeling, and understanding more, yet sorting the pertinent from the irrelevant with an ever finer touch, increasingly able to integrate what they see and to make meaning of it in ways that enhance their ability to go on growing.”
—Laurent A. Daloz (20th century)
“The Cairo conference ... is about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)