Last Tuesday, a few minutes before the lecture by Eitan Lucker - Air Force Brigadier General and a graduate of the Aleph School - three pupils chained themselves to the gate of the building, to protest the entry of army officers to schools in the role of "educators". Five policemen were present in the school from an early morning hour, even before the protest began.

The three remained chained to the gate throughout the officer's lecture. Pupils who passed them reacted in different ways: some expressed support, some were amused, but a small number threw stones at them and at the press photographers and took away their sign reading "No entry to officers in uniform.”

There had been anti-militarist manifestations in the school before: distribution of flyers; spontaneous protests during earlier lectures of officers; the hanging of a poster outside the headmaster's office during Memorial Day, opposing the place given to the military in the school curriculum.

The class to graduate this year is the most active, with a lot of serious, assertive people who are deeply involved in social and political issues. It is sad that the school regards this as something shameful, to be oppressed, rather than taking pride in the success of its declared aim: to make its pupils into active, critical citizens.

Brigadier General Lucker came as a graduate of the school, with the declared aim of increasing the pupils' motivation to enlist. This is the harbinger of a new education ministry program, nicknamed "a lieutenant colonel for every pupil". Every high school in Israel is to have an officer of that rank attached to it, whose task will be to "inoculate the IDF spirit in the pupils.” Already now, many schools have "soldier teachers" whose task includes teaching about the various units and corps in the army and training the pupils in standing to attention. Also, pupils go for a week to a camp of the Gad'na (Army Youth Corps) in which they undergo a kind of elementary military training, and get told about various army units of which they are expected to choose one.

In fact, the Ministry of Education has taken up two contradictory tasks. The minister and her officials often state that their aim is to educate young people to become thinking and caring citizens who do not resort to violence as the solution to their problems. But at the same time, the ministry is also emphasizing that school should prepare youngsters for entry into the army - a violent and male chauvinist institution, in which obedience is a supreme value and within which the possibility of voicing criticism is very limited to non-existent. These are two diametrically opposite purposes, and the education ministry must choose which set of values it is educating for: civilian or military.

In my view, of course, the choice is obvious. Preparation for enlistment should take place (if at all) outside the boundaries of the school, an institute which must be purely civilian and educate for civilian and democratic values – such as do not exist in any army, and definitely not in the Israeli army.

The great mistake of Headmaster Cohen is that instead of encouraging the process of civil-izing the school, led by the Aleph pupils, he is trying to suppress it. Even though Cohen recognizes how problematic the Gad'na week is, and has cancelled it (at least for this year), he still did not recognize how problematic it is to have uniformed officers enter the school in the role of educators. Headmasters should act together with pupils to make the schools a truly civilian institute, not fiercely oppose this aim. The violence evident in our daily life is to a considerable degree the result of the admiration and veneration for the army which are disseminated from above. The violence of some pupils to their chained fellows is just one more example.