We senior citizens like to think of ourselves as old hands who've seen it all, but twice a week I'm shocked by something, and one of the two for this week is going to be this article, in The New York Times, about private Jewish religious schools in New York. It begins:
The Hasidic Jewish community has long operated one of New York's largest private schools on its own terms, resisting any outside scrutiny of how its students are faring.
But in 2019 the school, the Central United Talmudical Academy, agreed to give state standardized tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students.
Every one of them failed.
And continues:
The leaders of New York's Hasidic community have built scores of private schools to educate children in Jewish law, prayer and tradition—and to wall them off from the secular world. Offering little English and math, and virtually no science or history, they drill students relentlessly, sometimes brutally, during hours of religious lessons conducted in Yiddish.
The result, a New York Times investigation has found, is that generations of children have been systematically denied a basic education, trapping many of them in a cycle of joblessness and dependency. . . .
The schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guaranty children an adequate education. Even so, the Times found, the Hasidic boys' schools have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone.
Maybe I’m shocked only because I’ve had a possibly exalted view of the intellectual acumen of Jews ever since I learned Albert Einstein was Jewish in the same week I heard Archie Bunker tell Edith that he didn’t want a Jewish doctor “unless I’m really sick.” Years ago I saw a movie, "Jesus Camp," about young kids sunk in the religious zealotry of the adults in their lives, and was nudged toward the view that Christian fundamentalism is child abuse. Now I’m thinking the phenomenon is ecumenical. It's outrageous that government supports with tax dollars religious schools that aren't teaching kids any math or science or literature (besides the Bible) while the politicians most eager to give them money are complaining about test scores at public schools and purging the libraries of books fundamentalists don't want to read. You can disagree with me, but I don´t want to hear from you till you’ve solved a problem from my 9th-grade public school kid’s math homework tonight:
Write an equation for the parabola that cuts the x-axis at 3, passes through (5, 12), and has an axis of symmetry at x = 2.
Apparently the children of Hasidim would benefit from being subjected to a standard form of adolescent torture that their elders, though plenty cruel, are in no position even to imagine.
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