squeak – “I want to know whether our leadership considers this an issue worth addressing. Are the people who ‘make the Gedolim aware’ of other issues in our community doing the same with this situation?”
I personally have no idea what is happening behind the Gedolim’s doors, and I would be surprised if anybody in the CR really did. Therefore, I’m not entirely sure what answer, if any, you’re looking for. You want to know what the Gedolim will do? How is anybody supposed to know that?
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artchill – “The reality is, there is no school or institution that is too big to fail. There is no inyan to have an able-bodied person with a decent mind sit and drink coffee all day. I’m in full agreement that married men should learn in kollel when they get married. But, by the beginning of Shana Revi’i close to 85% of them are burnt out and spending more time shmoozing about yenem than about Abaye and Ravah.”
First of all, where did you get this figure from? I wasn’t aware that there was an organization keeping track of exactly how much Torah is being learnt by every person in kollel, and would ttherefore be able to give you such a figure.
Secondly, the problems that squeak referred to were specifically about the sustainability of the school system. How much is or is not being learnt in kollels around the world is a different issue.
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Dave Hirsch – “There is one answer. Government. We pay taxes like everyone else, school tax, we deserve better. If we would all decide tomorrow that we are enrolling into public school, far more money would be needed from their part. We have the schools, buildings and infrastructure ready, we just need that shot-in-the-arm. Let them give us half ($9,000!) of the amount they spend on each public school student and we’ll be fine with it.”
Beside the issue that gavra_at_work pointed out, there is another problem. If the government could indeed be convinced to switch to a “school voucher” program (in which each child would get a “coupon” for $X toward tuition in the school of their choice, as opposed to simply being assigned to a nearby public school), you can bet that the government would make a ridiculous amount of rules and regulations that would need to be fulfilled in order to make a school eligible. And I’m not entirely convinced that these rules would be the type of rules that the average frum school can or should be following.
For example, let’s say one of the rules is that all schools in the program must spend at least half the day studying math, science, literature, or the arts. Let’s say a child has a 7 hour school day: 1:30 would be spent on meals (if the federal regulations didn’t make the meals longer), 2:45 on mandatory secular subjects, and 45 minutes for shachris (assuming the federal regulations allowed for prayer, which might not be the case as I believe the Supreme Court recently ruled that government-funded schools could not have prayer due to separation of church and state), leaving just 2 hours for any and all Jewish studies (including breaks). See where I’m going with this?