The following are some selections from Rabbi Berel Wein's article with the above title. See [
tinyurl.com] for the entire article. YL
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It is no secret that many of our day school and yeshivah graduates are not very literate in Hebrew language, know little Nach, are unexcited by the study of Mishnah and Talmud and are therefore in jeopardy of becoming children at risk. Though the problem is widespread and well known to all in the educational field and certainly to the parents of these children, it is not widely discussed in terms of curriculum emphasis and adaptation.
Generally, in our current religious society, legends, fantasies and inaccurate nostalgia are taught as facts. Fanciful stories that appear in current Orthodox newspapers and periodicals are believed as being factually true by children who are completely unaware of the simple meaning of the verses of the Torah that they have allegedly covered in school. To say that this may create a distorted view of Torah and Judaism is an understatement.
The study of Tanach is almost an oxymoron statement regarding our schools. During my years as the head of a high school yeshivah and beit midrash program, I discovered that most students who graduated from excellent elementary and high schools could not even name the twenty-four holy books of the Jewish canon. Students revealed amazing ignorance about the Hebrew language and all of the grammar/dikduk statements of Rashi and the other Biblical commentators were never covered in the classroom.
A student who has never studied Sefer Yechezkel, Sefer Iyov or Tehillim is unprepared for the omnipresent problems of Jewish national– or of his own personal–life.
The Judaic studies program in our boys’ schools is very heavily Talmud oriented from fifth and sixth grade onwards.
In previous generations in Europe and the early years in America, the study of Talmud was reserved for superior students and certainly not for the masses. All of this has changed in our current generation. The study of Talmud is widespread among adults and mandatory for our boys and, in some circles, even for our girls.
Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky, the sage of American Jewish life in the past generation, told me that it is wrong to impose an elitist education on the masses. But that is exactly what we are doing. The danger that all of us are aware of–it is the unspoken elephant in the room–is that a child who dislikes the study of Talmud at the age of ten is more than likely to dislike it even more at seventeen, and this leads often to tragic results, both personally and religiously.
A further element concerning curriculum in Jewish schools should be an accurate and inspirational presentation of Jewish history. A generation that has little knowledge of our past is always blindsided by current events. A student of Jewish history, even a cursory one, will realize that the problems that we face today are not new ones.
Jewish history is a sourcebook for faith and hope, for inspiration and tenacity. But Jewish history that is fanciful and false–stories that have no factual basis, inaccurate and hagiographic biographies, the portrayal of the past in the light of current political correctness– is a false and ultimately uninspiring and self-defeating educational venture. I think that false history, a form of poisonous insidious propaganda, is perhaps worse in the long run than no history at all.
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