I disagree oomis. allowing boys and girls to interact in a “fun get-togethers” at an young age is detrimental! lets not fool ourselves and believe that kids are capable of exercising self control without supervision. you paint a picture where interaction between boys and girls from young age will lead to better dating experience and marriage success…I beg to differ! looking back at my High School experience, the girls who had “boyfriends” or talked to guys on a steady basis developed either low self esteem because they depended on the boy’s value judgement of whether they were “cool enough” or “pretty” or “awesome” ect. and those who didn’t have low self esteem and were confident enough about themselves developed this gaming attitude where you make the boy like you by playing games, like being unreachable and talking to the other boy to make first boy more interested…ect. now some of you might be thinking, oh this is probably one of those modern high schools or s/thing…NO! this happened and happens in our local bais yaakovs! MY POINT: girls and boys at a young age DO NOT know what is appropriate or not because they have not developed sensitivities in tznius yet. you can’t expect a 15 year old to be as sensitive to tznius as one whose 20 who just returned from sem and learned the value of real dating and building a Jewish home, not just having “fun” with a boy!
same goes for a boy, you can’t expect them (with a boy’s mind) to keep things “clean” at this age, their yetzer hara is too strong!! they have not learnt yet enough to have self control and know the real value of building a Jewish home!
Do you know how many Yichud issues come up??!! children are children…u can’t expect them to act like adults and have an adult interaction!
Im speaking from expereince because I had friends and classmates who succumbed to this…what started as an innocent interaction with a boy lead a frum girl do serious averos!! what started off as FB friend lead to emotional damage and low self esteem in others….
So I bet your going to say that it doesn’t have to be this way, and that there can be interactions that wont’ lead to this…well then you do need it to be “overseen by a Rov”, because without authority or supervision, these pp get lose and it pulls away the best and the finest from yeshivos and bais yaakovs…
A boy should not have girls in his head when he’s learning, a boy should not have girls numbers on his cell phone or have FB girl friends…it leads to taivos, leads to averos…and these “fun get togethers” will just encourage that.
I can’t say I have a real solution to the shidduch crisis but if everyone in coffee room claims that today boys and girls are marrying too young, or too young to date…well are they suddenly adult enought to know how to control themselves when they are merely in high school?! I don’t think so.