Over the weekend, New York Times reporters Eliza Shapiro and Brian Rosenthal published a carefully reported exposé about the private school system run by the Hasidic Jewish community in New York. For decades, this insular community — which largely separates itself from the wider world, including a large majority of Jewish people — has operated its own piecemeal system of religious schools or yeshivas whose goal is “to educate children in Jewish law, prayer and tradition — and to wall them off from the secular world.” Students at these gender-segregated schools spend most of their classroom time on religious instruction, leaving them with very little basic education in science, math, history or other skills necessary in the modern world. The inevitable outcome, Shapiro and Rosenthal report, is that many are trapped “in a cycle of joblessness and dependency.” At one school mentioned in the article, more than 1,000 students took New York State’s standardized reading and math test, and not a single one passed.
Despite these failures, however, Shapiro and […]
Fact and history show us that uneducated citizens are easier to control.. easy to lie to. Seems to me there is yet again in American history, a growing schism between the educated and the uneducated. The Youngers seem to be more educated than the same age group a few years ago. And part of that is due to online classes, the Internet being used to tap into a vast store of knowledge, foreign languages, etc. A growing number don’t seem to understand the value of education.. but at the same time, I find Gen Z utterly fascinating.. and now we have them entering politics after being ‘self educated’ by their activist engagements on multiple levels. I believe it’s too judge what the outcome of this will be. I definitely wouldn’t underestimate the youngers. The majority have access to the Internet and personally, I don’t believe we can yet fully anticipate how far they’ll go! That said, there seems to be a broader focus in the US on $$$$. ie. social influencers on YouTube, etc..