A valuable exercise, no doubt, but it stops just short of where a young voter needs the most help.

How does a student discover which party actually reflects the priorities they identify as important? Where should they look for reliable information? How should they judge a promise against a party’s record, or decide between two plausible arguments?

First-time voters will account for about 10 percent of Israel’s eligible electorate. For those still in school, election season may be one of the few chances to practice political judgment in a setting where learning comes first.

The public isn't entirely convinced. In an IDI public opinion survey conducted in July 2026, 27 percent of Israeli adults said they wanted schools to avoid election-related topics, 34 percent favored teaching only the formal process, and 33 percent supported open discussion of parties’ positions on major issues.

Nonetheless, Israel's Ministry of Education has laid some useful groundwork, encouraging mock elections, discussion of civic participation and lessons on the importance of voting. Yet these efforts fall short of encouraging meaningful democratic participation, focusing on electoral procedure, with less attention paid to helping students develop well-informed political judgment.

Partisan campaigning is prohibited, rightfully so, and schools are expected to expose students to a range of positions. One way that students are exposed to these positions is by holding panels with representatives from political parties, a longstanding practice that illustrates both the promises and limits of the current system.

The Ministry sees these encounters as ways to expose students to a range of views and give them practical experience in democratic participation. But the Israeli public is divided on the value of such panels, especially across religious groups, whose members often attend separate school systems in Israel.

Moreover, the educational value of the panel depends on whether schools truly give students the opportunity to encounter a broad range of positions and whether they are given the tools to compare and assess what they’re hearing.

These tools are limited, as reflected in our review of the topics suggested for classroom discussion in the Ministry of Education’s election materials: “the economy,” “security,” “law,” “welfare,” and Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state.”

While these categories appear to invite political discussion, their broad and abstract framing largely strips away the concrete controversies that define electoral debate. The judiciary, for example, is subsumed under “law,” while Jewish-Arab relations do not appear among the suggested topics at all.

That is a serious gap because political choices are made through disagreement.

A student who says security is a top priority still has to choose among parties that may all claim to protect Israel while offering very different strategies. A student who cares about Israel’s Jewish and democratic character has to consider what those principles require when they come into tension.

The same is true of economic policy, the judiciary and relations between Jews and Arabs. Schools can help students work through those competing claims with evidence, context and an understanding of the tradeoffs involved, while remaining nonpartisan.

Many teachers currently lack the training and institutional backing to lead that kind of conversation. They fear complaints from parents, administrators, and public figures if a lesson is perceived as political, and indeed, ministry guidance spells out restrictions in detail and gives far less attention to the practical work of running a balanced debate.

When the cost of a misstep feels high, and the guidance feels vague, silence and avoidance become the safest choice.

Controversial questions can be discussed in a nonpartisan classroom. The quality of the discussion depends on the sources chosen, the accuracy with which competing views are presented, the way unsupported claims are challenged and the teacher’s willingness to let students reach their own conclusions.

These are professional skills, and the ministry can set clear standards for them.

Schools also have something that campaigns and social media rarely offer: time and structure. A teacher can slow a claim down, ask where it comes from, put competing proposals side by side, and require students to understand an argument before dismissing it.

That kind of classroom work would give young voters practice separating slogans from evidence and strong opinions from well-supported ones.

Political literacy should become an explicit part of election education. Students need recurring practice with real sources and competing policy proposals. They should learn to trace a promise, examine a record in office, test a claim against evidence, explain an opposing position fairly, and reconsider a view when the facts change.

Israel’s schools already teach students that voting matters. The harder lesson is how to reach a decision worth owning.

The choice of which party to vote for is ultimately a personal one, but the capacity to make an informed and independent choice is part of the democratic civic competence that must be developed long before Election Day.

Meital Baron and Daphna Cahana-Dolev are experts at the Israel Democracy Institute's Education Policy Program.