Let those who want to learn go ahead and do so. But it has come to the point where someone who isn’t cut out for learning his whole life is viewed as a second-class citizen. No wonder so many kids feel like failures. As for the dismal math of everyone learning, the Torah is omeid al haneis, meaning yeshivos should never do well bederech hateva. If we turn today’s kids into successes instead of failures, we might find ourselves with less dropouts and less kids turned off to Yiddishkeit. That was the point of the article. In Lita, many balabatim were big lamdanim. Not everyone is on the level of Rabbi Shimon Bar yochai of “Toraso umnaso”. It’s time we realize that when the gemara says Rabbi Yishmael’s way of talmud torah im derech eretz worked out better, the gemara knew better than us.
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