@ujm I think that the authors of those articles are a little too optimistic about the lifstyles that the OTD generation grew up with. Take a poll of people in their 30s who went to a MO Co-Ed highschool and I would venture to guess you will find few that made any effort to put on teffilin every day, or be careful about mitzvos when they weren’t in school or shul. This is already two or three generations down the line. Of course kids are going off the derech! Their parents were barely on it to begin with!
@AviraDeArah So you think it’s appropriate to (as Chazal tell us) teach your children how to steal? Because all your justifications don’t amount to much against that one thing.
Yes, Acharonim recognized that we are not on the level of our predecessors. We simply cannot gain everything we need to know from the Torah alone. We need to learn about the world around us. Studies of math and science aren’t “secular”, they are part of what we need to know. I’m not saying that you can’t learn Torah without other learning, but that other learning is absolutely an essential aspect of Jewish life. Do you think it’s a coincidence that Tosfos explains a geometry problem in the same way Socrates wrote it out hundreds of years earlier? Could the Agudah have launched their offensive against the New York government and Times without the help of hundreds of frum lawyers and people experienced in writing? Would we have Shabbos ovens had not engineers worked with GE and designed what was needed?
That’s not to say we need to have gender studies classes in Bais Yaakov C”V. I doubt even the most liberal MO schools have gone that far. It means what I said (and you conveniently ignored). Yeshivos and Bais Yaakovs need to teach basic science, language, and social studies. There is a chapter in Rav Hirsch’s Horeb where he outlines a school curriculum. It’s probably not nogeya today (this being 21st century America, not 19th century Germany) but it’s a great insight into what is needed.
Communities who live with this apikorsus idea of a Torah lifestyle means “only Gemara and halacha” absolutely are not “wildly successful in business”. For the most part they are destitute and rely on a combination of tzedaka and government handouts, with many of the more desperate ones resorting to cheating with things like cash-only businesses. There are yechidim that are successful and they (along with educated Torah Jews who are a bit naive from outside the community) keep the whole house of cards from falling. You have your facts as wrong as the NY Times does.