Ben Levi:
There are so many reasons why things are worse now, and it has nothing to do whatsoever with the scientific training of professionals having input into the system. If we would be so silly, we could blame it on telephones. Our yeshivos and youth were better off before there were phones everywhere. Or same goes for unleaded gasoline. You’re being ridiculous.
Our yeshivos fell into the trap with so many others where we have placed academic excellence on a pedestal, as we did with “traditional values”, at the expense of true chinuch. Our yeshivos have refined their approaches to discipline to be so much more powerful (actually brutal) than ever before. We can embarrass or shame any child into submission, and we can threaten with suspensions or expulsions to extort conforming behavior or tuition monies. All this is viewed as being aggressive “lichvod Hashem Yisborach” when it is actually much the opposite. We crowd children into classrooms creating group dynamics that were never modeled by our predecessors. Our skills to manage such classrooms are not archaic, they are frankly abusive and purposeless. HKB”H is uninvited.
We have sunk to the lows of a photographic society. It’s all about appearance. We cannot consider a shidduch because a sibling of a prospect has issues, or someone wears different levush. We know all about our “leaders” in their appearances in photos, at tashlich, Hoshana Rabah, burning chometz, benching Chanukah Neiros, dancing at simchos, but there is nary a glimpse of their midos tovos. All we know about these leaders is the light bulbs, crowds, and other forms of pomp that surround them. We should all be disillusioned, and we should be thirsting for the true Yir’as Hashem and Ahavas Hashem that should be our basic source of energy. No, technology did not take that away, nor did the college education of the many professionals we have in the fields of medicine, law, mental health, accounting and business, education, and other sciences. We urbanized our lifestyles into patterns that would not be recognizable to the gedolim of earlier generations.
Things are worse, because we are worse. And, Ben Levi, join the rest of us in accepting responsibility for your contribution. Now, let’s re-examine where we should be heading, and let’s rechart our life course to go there. ?????? ?’ ???? ??????. We cannot even be serious in this venture if we stay glued to the external perceptions, believe that someone who looks “the part” is necessarily so, if we allow our yeshivos and schools to run “compliance programs” as priorities to full rounded education of Torah, its values, and the expectations for real Yiddishkeit. We cannot expect marriages to succeed if we make so many other activities more important than a couple growing together. Does it really matter to which parents the young couple goes for Yom Tov? We cannot expect our children to learn honesty about money and other matters if we conceal, lie, and cheat in our personal affairs and our mosdos. No, it’s not the influence of the educated social worker who consults to the yeshiva. It’s more likely the administrators. The incidence of abuse is not the result of consulting professionals, but the blind assumptions that anyone in a position of power has clean hands. What happened to supervision and accountability?
Ben Levi, you ask good questions, but are seriously mistaken in your assumptions of the answers. I just outlined a list of stuff here. There is a serious need to change our foundations, not to modernize, but to return to the chinuch approach that our zaides used. If anything, professionals have looked to help filter the maladaptations of the system to the challenges of the day. It is not about modern ideas, it is about true Torah chinuch, which is harder than ever to find today, anywhere, Chassidish, Litvish, Sefardic, MO, and whatever else.