With regard to the specific question about family law, I agree that R. Hirsch is a valuable resource, at the very least because he both effective in lowering the temperature, calming the vehemence of the question. I cannot condemn the previous 12 years of education for not having reached and addressed one particular Halakha in Devarim.
Having said this, it often seems to me that Limmude Kodesh curricula often devote significant energy to propagating a Torah hashkafa, including respect for divine commands. What may be harder is to teach skepticism of liberal dogma. This is true not only of the so-called Modern Orthodox. I frequently encounter young people (& the older generation is no better!) who have been carefully educated to shun liberal arts education and are innocent of having read philosophy or literature or history. Yet their default assumptions about everything, from how to think to how to feel are carbon copies of the secularist outlook they have been carefully made ignorant of. Whether they get these ideas from the mass media or the internet or their frum teachers who have been raised the same way but simply haven't gotten around to adding things up is immaterial. The upshot is that when they get to me, their thought patterns have been cemented and it requires enormous effort to put these to question.
My impressions may be skewed by my own experience. I doubt that I would believe what I do today if I had been unable to hold my society's shibboleths at arm's length. And some of the young people I mentioned reach me because they have been referred to me. Nonetheless, assuming it is impossible to prevent students from exposure to all of the above dangers, I wonder if it is possible to introduce a little more critical thinking a little bit earlier. Or is this too radical a subversion of the status quo?
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/09/2017 06:56AM by mlb.
