oyyoyyoy: Ha ha ha. Get back to me in June- 100 Galleons that my opinion won’t have changed.
And obviously there’s still adjustment and things I’m having a hard time with so far, but overall I think it’s awesome.
PAA: I’m actually not sure that it is a joke. Just to clarify (if my point needed clarification), the things I don’t like about kollel are more things that I don’t like about it being the default option. It’s a lifestyle that I’d personally consider but not because society will pressure me into it and not because I’ll “flip out” over here.
Lior: What PAA says in his response to you definitely applies, but I’d also like to address some of DY’s points that he makes in his last post: more choice. Exoticism. ISRAEL. For many many girls, another year of post-high school learning after twelfth grade just feels like thirteenth grade in a slightly different setting. I know that I never once considered it (if I hadn’t gone to sem I’d’ve gone straight to Stern, which would have saved my parents money, actually). Perhaps if there was an additional grade of school called “seminary” that was expected (as I believe they do things in Eretz Yisrael) it would be different, but many girls simply would not buy into the whole concept of seminary if not for the exoticism and newness of spending a year abroad in the Eretz Hakodesh. I know that to be honest, my parents pushed me to go to sem as much for the chavayah as anything else. My sister doesn’t want to go to Israel for sem and my parents aren’t pushing the sem concept for her nearly as much as they did for me. College, in many cases (though definitely not all) is cheaper and more effective as far as future life is concerned in the long run. So what makes people go to seminary and devote their full year to limudei kodesh? The chavayah, the experience of Eretz Yisrael.
And what, you say, about domestic sem? This is obviously not definitive, but my experience has been in the past that girls who go to local or non-Israel sem (such as my cousin who went to Toronto or my friend who went to Gateshead) did this as an alternative to going to Israel, because while all their friends were going to Israeli sems, this wasn’t a good option for them. It seems to me that people go to non-Israeli sems as an alternative to Israeli sems and very much not vice versa. Israel is a publicity mechanism, in a way, for the seminary experience itself, no matter where it might be. If the Israel seminary as an institution was abolished, I doubt that the American/British/etc system would stay afloat for long after.
This is obviously a debatable point, but from my vantage point I’d say it’s a valid one.