Reply To: The end of the galus.

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market forces: seems that easier to be an honest doctor than teacher. I am aware that I am contradicting R Salanter here: someone said that he is burnt out in shechita as he is afraid of aveiros and wants to go into business. R Salanter said that there are more potential aveiros in business.

Still, most jobs in free countries are competitive and regulated. So, outside of actual fraud, most people do their jobs decently even if their yetzer harah tells them otherwise. At the same time, “Jewish” jobs are more protected, medieval style, and hinge on diligence of principals and Rabbis. When raising questions about chinuch, I often heard “trust me” or “trust Hashem”, in one extreme case, “where else are you going to go now”. I quoted already a Rav here who was told to trust Hashem on who the 6th grade teacher will be next year, replied that his check will meanwhile be in Hashem’s escrow .. R Kamenetsky and R Ruderman recalled their 2nd grade Rebbe and blamed him that “only” two of them became T’Ch from their class … I am not saying that everyone is like that, H’V. I am saying – the system allows that. There are good reasons for this, as our current system is an emergency response to Shoah and assimilation and a lot of good results were achieved, but we are living in this emergency for 80 years already.

Maybe we can think how we can introduce right social measures – accountability, transparency, competition – to make systems work better. This is not new – halakha specifically allows unlimited competition in chinuch to make it affordable. That might mean, for example, breaking up big schools into smaller classes; online options; making schools less ideological so that people can choose different school without fear of indoctrination into another hashkofa; “rate my rebbe” .com, publishing test results (both Torah and secular) …

but I digress. The relevant point here is that the less competitive nature of chinuch allows for less ethical behavior. Allows, nit requires, but some people might take advantage.