One thing I’ve been meaning to suggest for a while: Anyone hoisting the flag of Hanoh La-na'ar al pi darko should be required to juxtapose it with Hosekh shivto soneh bno. They are, after all, from the same text, so if one of them is an authoritative prescription for our education, the other must be too. As you know, I think caning should be brought back, but if we’re not going to do that can people at least stop bothering me with this inanity?
Next, if anybody pointed out the obvious confusion of correlation with causality in this thread, it must have slipped past me. Even if Jewish day schools did nothing at all one would expect their graduates to be less prone to assimilation than their fellows; they come, after all, from families concerned enough about the matter to spend a fortune sending their kids to a Jewish day school, and they’re surrounded constantly by other Jews. Of course there may also be a causal connection, and there was some conjecture as to what it might be, but it’s hard to get from that to an answer to the original question – where does the time go?
Predictably, nobody made any suggestions that involved teaching in the traditional sense, even though the original question related more to ignorance than to apostasy. Maybe it’s time we faced facts and started calling faculty members “counselors” rather than “teachers”. Certainly that fits better with Eric Paul’s description of “slowly and painstakingly with great perseverance and dedication building relationships with Jewish youth.”
Michael
