Yinglish, English and the State of Yeshiva Education Today--Part #2

I'm going to make a statement that is going to raise hackles in my readers: yeshiva ketanas and high schools in New York today are turning out semi-literates and illiterates by the hundreds, by the thousands. While the girls yeshivot are doing a marginally better job in some areas, they, too, are contributing to the "dumbing down of America," and certainly to the dumbing down of Klal Yisroel.


I have taught every grade from nursery through college. I am not happy with what I see. The education gap existing between today's students in elementary school and their grandparents is wider than the Grand Canyon. Today's yeshiva students go to school for more hours and come out less educated then past generations did. Why?

Past generations--read immigrant generations here--came with nothing to this country. They reasoned that an education was a way to get ahead here. Thus, they made sure that their children were educated, and educated well. Unless a child was just not a "book learning" person or unless that child had a real bent for business (or had a dad with a business to go into) the children were sent to college, yes, the frum kids too. [And you would not believe the huge numbers of shidduchim that got made among these college students because they were on the same campus.] And many of them also spent their days learning in yeshiva. And some of the gedolim of those days were also themselves university educated.

Those same generations came here speaking many languages other than English. They were older and learning English was hard, but learn it they did, because without being able to communicate in English you were "going nowhere."

And what did those college educated sons and daughters do when they graduated college? They got "good" jobs and became, many of them, highly successful in their chosen fields. And because they had the money to do so, many of them donated generously to the yeshivas they had attended as children. And born were the huge edifices that are seen all over Brooklyn and other parts of the city--and yes, other parts of the country as well. And how did these yeshivot return the favors done for them? By taking the children and grandchildren of these "builders" and inculcating them with the idea that college is "treif," that college is unnecessary. Indeed, all secular learning is unnecessary. Of course, they had a "wee" problem, in that they were not at all opposed to taking government money for funding programs in their schools,such as free breakfasts and free lunches etc., a government who said "thou shalt educate your children according to our curriculum."

This did not sit well with a lot of parents, who countered the yeshiva party line with different ideas at home. And this "countering" did not sit well with the yeshivot. And they sure were not happy with the government telling them what to do either.

What was born, consciously or unconsciously, was a sure fire method for denigrating secular studies. First, decide that not enough learning is going on. Lengthen the school day so more learning can take place. Please understand that I am not, repeat not anti-learning. How could I possibly be? It is a basic tenet of Yiddishkeit that the men of Klal should be learned. [Of course it is also required that a father teach his son a trade, but that is a differnt posting.] But in adding in more and more learning to the school day, the yeshivot also had "rachmanus" on the students. How many hours a day could the poor kids sit in one place? So the amount of time given over for secular studies was shortened. Of course, nature abhors a vacuum and more learning took the place of the time taken from the foreshortened secular studies--and then they made the school day even longer.

Now the government and even some parents were still insisting that the quality of secular learning should remain high. And yes, the "real" teachers who were teaching secular studies were also demanding this. And yeshivot were still in a quandary: how to de-emphasize secular studies and how to add in more learning and yet keep the government and those "noisy" parents off their backs?

One answer was to hire teachers who were "unqualified" but were products of the yeshivot themselves. Such a teacher, they reasoned, would be far more likely to "follow the party line" and would demand less from the students. (Not to mention demanding less in salary, fodder for a different posting). They would have "rachmanus" on the poor students who had no time to breath, never mind do all their secular studies homework, and anyway everyone knows that "yiddishe kinderlach" are "brilliant" so everyone managed to get at least a "B." If not straight "A's." And it has been downhill ever since.

Students are applauded for their "creativity" never mind that they can't spell their name the same way twice. Read a book? An English book? You are kidding, aren't you? I mean, you know what horrible things the students will be exposed to in "English" books. And if you can find a piece of English writing that is "kosher" there are still objections. Why should our students be learning lessons from anything not "under Jewish auspices"?

Just as an aside here--it is not only English fiction that is suspect. I was present when an elementary school principal, an older woman and herself the wife of a noted Rosh HaYeshiva, was fuming. The Hanhollah of the school had just banished a math workbook used in the second grade. Why? There was a picture, a black and white line drawing, which showed a man standing at a sink with one of his children, and the man was washing the dishes. What kind of treif foolishness were those little girls being exposed to!

And then there was the Rosh Yeshiva who, in public and in the presence of lots of people who verified his words, said: "English books? They should all be put in a pile and burned!" Strange, our history books--you know, the ones our students are not encouraged to read--show the Nazis making the exact same statement. Great company for a rosh yeshiva to find himself in.

Even computers and classes in how to use the computer are seen as suspect. The reasoning goes this way: teach them how to turn on the computer and they might want to use it--teach them how to use a word processing program and they might want to see what else the computer can do--teach them what else a computer might do and they might find their way to the Internet--let them get on the Internet and they are going to find pornography--let them find pornography and they will leave Yiddishkeit. Better not to start with computers at all.

Geography? Why bother. Everyone can get from Borough Park to Flatbush. Geometry? Two weeks in the summer should do. History? Goyish history? The chumash and gemorah will give them all the history they need. Biology? How can anyone recommend teaching full biology classes when everyone knows it's all about the Theory of Evolution and about sex? Chemistry? See Biology. And so on ad nauseum.

A note here about geography. One would think that yeshivot would teach the "Shoah." I mean, that is "our" history. Very few have an actual curriculum that teaches the subject. And some of the students who are exposed to knowledge about the "Shoah" are a bit "fuzzy" about the geography. A student in a yeshiva high school I was teaching in wrote on an exam that "Germany, located in the southern part of the United States, went to kill all the Jews. This is sometimes known as World War and sometimes known as the Civil War." One example of a poor student? If only this were true.

Despite the fact that I don't teach geography as a subject, I "prove" to my male students that they have been shortchanged in their education. I bring in a blank world map for everyone and tell them to fill in the names of the countries. I ask them to specifically locate Germany, Poland, Israel, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya. Guess what? They can't do it. Some can't find New York either, despite living here.

And yet, strangely enough, yeshiva high schools continue to give Regents diplomas. In New York a student can sign themselves out of high school at the age of 16. There are a few chasidishe girls high schools that have no senior year, precisely because the government does not mandate high school graduation, only being in school until you are at least 16. But the boys yeshiva high schools play the game differently. You get the Regents Diploma so we can point out that all our students graduate high school, and we are therefore better than the public schools, which cannot make that claim. Of course, in so many cases and in so many ways that claim is a sham.

The morning my oldest daughter was scheduled to take the Regents exam in Chemistry, New York woke up to glaring headlines in all the newspapers, on television and on the radio. The answers to the Regents had been stolen, and then had been sold to hundreds of students across the City. The Regents was cancelled. The scandal was tremendous. And who were the perpetrators? Students at one of the "frummy" boys yeshivot in Brooklyn. And not for the first time, either--for the second time in as many years. And who knows how many other times where the boys were not caught? Can anyone spell "chilul Hashem"? And was there a tremendous outcry in Klal Yisroel against the theft? Surely you jest. The general attitude was "What's the big deal? It's only a Chemistry Regents. Nobody died."

Eighteen years ago a new boys yeshiva high school opened up, not in Brooklyn, although it was targeting Brooklyn boys, but in Staten Island. It used as its selling point that they would be teaching computers and that they were going to provide "real" biology labs. The boys would also have the opportunity for AP studies and for taking courses while in high school that would carry college credit. The secular studies staff members were all credentialed public high school teachers, many of them frum. The school closed down a few years ago--among other reasons was that there just were not enough boys interested in what was being offered; there were lots of easier ways to get through high school then to actually have to buckle down and learn something.

To give credit where credit is due, there are some parents who buck the yeshivas and who insist that their sons, and their daughters, get a solid secular education. They supplement at home what the yeshivas don't give in school. They encourage reading and learning and knowing of secular subjects. They nudge and get the high schools to actually provide teachers for the subjects in the senior year, even if it is only a few boys who utilize the teachers. And they tell their boys--and their girls--"You are going to college."

And yes, there are still a few high schools--and elementary schools--left who give the students what they paid for--an education. They are in the minority. And strangely enough, or really not so strangely, on a line they fall in the center or to the left, never to the right. The girls yeshiva high schools are behind the boys high schools in the poor education they give, but they are fast catching up.

I teach college and have for many years now. I get the results of our yeshiva brand of secular education in my classroom. So do my fellow professors. And unanimously we are agreed that "there is something rotten in Denmark." Our boys and girls are bright enough but something has "dimmed their bulbs." That something is the lack of a solid education in secular studies. That something is the attitude towards learning secular subjects. And what we are also seeing is a huge divide between out of towners, with a much stronger grasp of secular studies, and their New York counterparts.

In Europe, in Yiddish, the word "dorferish" was used to connote someone coming from a small village, with the understanding that these people were uneducated, unworldly and decidedly backwards. It was not a compliment. New York, the largest center of frumkeit outside of Eretz Yisroel, is fast on its way to becoming "dorferish." A sad commentary on the state of secular education in our yeshivot.

Do you have an answer? Let me hear from you.