Tolerance, pluralism and critical thinking will be promoted in Israel’s schools if planned reforms to the curriculum and test system are adopted.

“Who was Sartre?”, “What did Spinoza believe?”, “When was the Battle of the Somme?”, and “How has post-modernism influenced the development of society?” are just some of the questions Israeli schoolchildren may be answering when the new national tests are introduced in 2004.

Ronit Tirosh, the education ministry’s director general, said she has given a committee of senior ministry personnel until early January to recommend the basis for a core curriculum, the details of which will be filled out by next summer, and to suggest how, when, and on what, to test pupils.

She plans to to train educators next year and introduce the core curriculum in 2003.

The committee will recommend how many subjects to include in the core but she has told the committee that she wants pupils to leave school with: basic facts about Israel and the world, including key dates, events and personalities; values such as tolerance and pluralism; and skills such as the ability for critical thinking.

Nationwide testing was tried in primary schools, and scrapped in 1992, largely because of claims that teachers were “teaching to the test” at the expense of learning. Ms Tirosh has consequently called on the committee to select the essentials carefully, and refrain from overloading pupils with facts.

She would like to test reading at age seven, maths and English at 10, and science at 13 or 14, although the committee might suggest differently.

She personally favours publishing test results after a dry run in which the data are seen only by the schools. “This is not about encouraging competition between schools. It’s about giving everyone the data they need to decide where to put the money, and the emphasis.”

One of the hardest things will be to build a curricular core that is also acceptable to the rapidly growing independent, but state-funded, ultra-orthodox sector, which today educates some 15 per cent of Jewish pupils.

The education ministry has given orthodox schools huge autonomy. Many teach only religious subjects, and reject the state’s legitimacy for theological reasons. The mention of evolution, pluralism, or the Israeli Declaration of Independence, would set the orthodox world spinning. But nothing will be imposed on these schools.