The Epistemology and Ontology of School Counselling in a Colonial Ethnocentric Education System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper critiques the politics of Israeli school counselling and the values underlying this profession in a settler-colonial context. It addresses the research question: How do economic, sociocultural, and political forces shape Israeli school counselling? Deploying post-structural frameworks of power/knowledge, as well as postcolonial and decolonial thoughts, we conduct a discourse analysis of the Israeli school counselling profession, unpacking its ideologies and functions in a settler-colonial region. Using Foucauldian genealogy as a methodology, we analyse ninety-four interdisciplinary archival documents, historical incidents, and policies to uncover the political-economic values and morality embedded in school counselling. Our findings reveal that settler-colonial practices and Zionist political-economic interests have shaped the profession, turning school counsellors into subsidiary authorities that perpetuate Zionist ideology and justify colonisation through mental health interventions. In conclusion, this research illuminates that Israeli school counselling is not a culturally neutral or universally beneficent profession but, instead, a paradigmatic case of how mental health professions can be instrumentalised by the state to further colonial and ethnonationalist agendas. Additionally, this study highlights the importance of critiquing the political-economic agendas that influence professional institutions, educational and mental health leadership roles, and their broader societal implications.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".