Re: Whether secular studies are “necessary for life”, it would be silly to claim that each individual “fact” is an absolute necessity, but education is not learning a set of facts, it’s engaging material in different ways, learning how to think critically and creatively, and so on. If you don’t learn how to do that in elementary school, the odds are that you never will. And no, you can’t get it all from gemara, and certainly not from gemara as it’s taught in yeshivas.
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