I’m going to start with four strong opinions and base the rest of what I’m saying on those.
- A proper frum education is necessary
- A secular education is necessary in this American golus
- A school can be very successful at both of these
- The secular education given by very many frum schools is very inadequate or non-existent
The main sensible argument I’ve heard against this is “Parents have a right to teach their kids how they want and it seems to work”. I would say no! As frum Yidden we absolutely do not believe in “rights” and “personal choice”. Parents have a responsibility to educate their children properly and that includes also in secular studies. And no, it doesn’t seem to work either. Many people who graduate from theses Yeshivos are forced to fight for a small number of jobs in the frum community and rely on their wives and government aid to just barely survive poverty. It’s not even a choice for people anymore. Many feel pressured by friends, family, neighbors, and the looming prospect of shidduchim leaving only the “just Limudei Kodesh” schools as the only available options.
Now it doesn’t matter what the NY Slimes or the moisers said. There is a huge problem with Yeshivos in New York and New Jersey that are under the mistaken impression that the only way to have a proper frum education is to forgoe a proper secular one. The fact that this has been going on for so long means that they were hanging by a thread and just waiting for something to trigger repercussions. And here those repercussions are.
In my opinion, the frum oilom should have worked with the government better on this. They could have taken say, Chaim Berlin, for example, which is probably scores near the top on most standardized secular metrics and said that this is the baseline secular education that Yeshivos would follow. What this would have resulted in would be perceived as the Litvish and Yeshiva working crowd using the government to put pressure on certain institutions which would be potentially bad. But the alternative is (with all due respect to the Agudah, Rabbi Hoffman, and legions of other talmidei chachamim who have weighed in on this topic) a united front towards suicide. Right now, Rabbonim and askanim are in vain trying to convince the world that since Chaim Berlin does well on the Regents, therefore the government should back off from the Yeshivos that don’t even teach the kids to speak English. Which no one accepts, so now we have to deal with a government that wants to force all Yeshivos to not only study reading, riting, and rithmatic, but also gender studies, heretical philosophy, and comparative religion.