In my view, Zvi Grumet has done the Modern Orthodox educational community a great service by attempting to amass data regarding the long-term effects of Jewish day school education. Because culture and the world we live in is a dynamic rather than static system, it should not be surprising that time-honored methods and content that may have been optimally geared to past iterations of the Jewish community, have to be constantly tweaked and updated in order to remain maximally effective in the present as well as into the future. Grumet encapsulates this need when he states in the summary of his findings:
…there are currently multiple “labels†used for identification, some of which formally or informally legitimize or even embrace the fluidity of dogma. This diversity, combined with contemporary acceptance of the fluidity of identities—including sexual identity—poses on of the greatest challenges to the current generation of educators and religious leadership.
Gaining greater understanding of where the current day school student body “is at†by fleshing out a picture of the current state of day school graduates’ overall Jewish observance and belief allows for such an evaluation and constructive discussion to take place by all of the stakeholders, i.e., faculty members, parents, students, subject matter specialists, etc. I heartily endorse the plan to follow-up this quantitative study with qualitative ones that will help uncover the specific causes why in various instances, some students have become alienated from Orthodoxy, and even Judaism.
In the meantime, certain findings, in my opinion, point to areas requiring immediate discussion and concerted action:
1) The fact that students feel that their educations have not helped them develop strong Jewish identities, as well as left them unprepared to function religiously in the secular world, requires significant curricular and extra-curricular programming initiatives.
2) The recognition that post-graduation there is a general drop-off in observance, particularly in the area of personal intimacy and interdating, strongly implies to my mind a reformulation of how to present all Halachic practices in an immediately relevant fashion that is strongly tied to dogma and belief, with special attention paid to those topics that appear to be particularly ignored.
3) If it is contended that until marriage, during the period that has been designated as “the Odyssey Years,†and that could extend into an individual’s 30’s and even 40’s (!), there is a noticeable decline in observance, I believe that schools and synagogues have to make it their business to reach out and stay in touch with as many graduates as possible in order to attempt to anchor them Jewishly as much as possible.
4) Finally, it seems to me that many of these observations underscore the “disconnect†between the lifestyles of many Judaic studies faculty members and their students. If there are few shared cultural values, or, even more detrimental, there is a sense that students’ and their families’ practices are frowned upon and disrespected, it is more likely for the young person to view what he is being taught as irrelevant to how he wishes to live his life. Trying to assure that students make connections to their teachers with whom they can easily identify, is, in my view, an important means by which these disturbing trends can be substantively affected.
Yaakov Bieler
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/01/2018 10:42AM by mlb.
