{"id":5114,"date":"2023-07-22T20:31:12","date_gmt":"2023-07-22T20:31:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/?p=5114"},"modified":"2023-07-22T20:49:05","modified_gmt":"2023-07-22T20:49:05","slug":"educating-for-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/educating-for-failure\/","title":{"rendered":"Educating For Failure"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Educating For Failure\u2014An Analysis (22 July 2023) by Lawrence Davidson<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Part I\u2014UItra-Orthodox Jews: The Hasidim\/Haredi<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Most ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects originated as part of an 18th century spiritual revival movement\u2014which was in turn a reaction to the secular influence of the Enlightenment. The name used in Europe for this multifaceted movement was Hasidism (piety), or in modern Israel, Haredi (one who trembles at the word of God). Geographically, the movement\u2019s origin was in Eastern Europe, and particularly Poland. Yiddish was a common tongue for the Hasidim, as well as for many of the secular Jews of this region. While fragmenting into many sub-groups over time, the Hasidim\/Haredi sought community preservation through isolation from the secular world. They developed a dress code and personal habits that would enhance this separation and a system of education that excluded secular knowledge while emphasizing the study of religious texts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Just before World War II, the numbers of Hasidim in Europe ran into the hundreds of thousands. The Holocaust that followed brought them to the brink of extinction. Here, self-isolation worked against them. For most people, worldviews are locally constructed and in the case of the Hasidim this meant that they knew nothing of the world outside their own communities. In times of crisis they had no internal human resources to fall back on. In addition, their idiosyncratic lifestyle meant they could not readily hide amidst the general population. They easily fell victim to the Nazis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>After the war the little that was left of these communities were, ironically, able to regroup largely thanks to outside intervention\u2014the willingness of Zionist leaders in Palestine to take them in and provide the necessary financial support for rebuilding. And what did rebuilding mean to the Hasidic\/Haredi leaders in the wake of the Holocaust? It meant replicating the prewar past as exactly as possible. As it turned out, one key to doing so was to resurrect a benighted faux-educational process that once more turned its back on the secular world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Part I\u2014Israel<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>According to Anshel Pfeffer, one of the permanent opinion writers at the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, \u201cThe whole point of Haredi education \u2026 has been to rebuild the communities devastated in Europe through isolating their children from the world and preventing any \u201cforeign\u201d influence in their schooling.\u201d Pursuing this goal \u201cin democratic countries with modern welfare systems was supposed to both allow them to teach without state interference while receiving public funding.\u201d At first this might seem a naive set of goals but, as we will see, it has proved doable simply by turning the recovering Hasidic communities into disciplined voting blocs. Thus, in the case of Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu recently \u201cpromised the ultra-Orthodox parties that \u2026 he would act to give their schools full public funding without requiring them to add general studies to their curriculum\u201d in exchange for their electoral support. It was a maneuver that helped him achieve his present position of power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Haredi education is gender segregated and boys in particular get little or no exposure to science, social science or the humanities. They spend almost all their study time analyzing Talmudic text and related commentaries of past religious scholars. Most of the boys never go into the labor force. Since, in this supportive environment, the Haredi population has been growing, and thus becoming a larger percentage of the Israeli population, this wholly non-secular education will, as Pfeffer notes, have \u201cmajor implications for the future of the Israeli economy.\u201d Indeed, the fulfillment of Haredi ambitions in this regard has already seriously split the Israeli Jewish population and unleashed deeply negative emotions among secular elements who must pay the taxes to fulfill Netanyahu\u2019s promise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Part II\u2014New York<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>After Israel, the United States has one of the world\u2019s largest ultra-Orthodox communities\u2014much of it located in the New York City and state area. \u201cThere are about 200,000 Hasidic Jews in New York.&#8221; They have revived the dress code of their pre-World War II enclaves and pursued their policy of isolation. In the name of preserving ancient traditions, the American Hasidic community, like its Israeli counterpart, has created \u201cone of New York\u2019s largest private school systems (more than 100 schools for boys) which it runs on its own terms.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 2019, one of these schools, the Central United Talmudical Academy, agreed to the administering of state standardized tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 of its students. Using New York State grading standards, \u201cevery one of their students failed.\u201d The failures were not a function of underfunding or administrative incompetence. As a recently published New York Times (NYT) expose puts it, the Hasidic schools \u201cfail by design.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Students, particularly the boys, are taught \u201cJewish law, prayer and tradition\u201d and almost nothing else. All classes are conducted in Yiddish. This certainly succeeds in \u201cwalling them off from the secular world.\u201d It also produces high school graduates who are functionally illiterate relative to the world beyond their communities. Most students graduate school \u201cwithout learning to speak English fluently, let alone read or write at grade level.\u201d The conclusion of the NYT is that, in violation of state law, \u201cgenerations of children have been systematically denied a basic education, trapping many of them in a cycle of joblessness and dependency.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As in Israel, state officials in New York know that this is going on. However, meaningful action to address the problem has never been taken. Why is that the case?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Part III\u2014An Element of Corruption<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There appears to be an exception to the otherwise passive ignorance practiced by the ultra-Orthodox. The Hasidic\/Haredi leaders have developed the ability to secure outside resources (state aid) within a pliable, corrupt environment. In both the U.S. and Israel this now translates into an election-based democracy with a peculiar bureaucratic arrangement wherein bribable politicians control the greater society\u2019s educational regulations. These politicians then trade turning a blind eye to Hasidic\/Haredi violation of the rules in exchange for the community\u2019s bloc votes.<br>This corruptive environment has been working for the ultra-Orthodox in Israel and the U.S. Yet, whether they understand it or not, it puts them in an exceedingly precarious position. For how readily are they able to recognize and adapt to any change that introduces a less accommodating environment? They have little ability to do so and are apparently not interested in acquiring this skill. They have arranged things to protect their ignorance of secular society by relying on sympathetic, more worldly Jews (mostly lawyers), to handle their problems and challenges. Sometimes this works, but not always. In countries such as England, Australia, and Canada smaller Hasidic communities have faced inescapable pressure to reform their educational curriculum from state bureaucracies not susceptible to electoral manipulation. Most of these communities have been unable to adequately respond and so their long-term survival is in doubt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Part IV\u2014Conclusion<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What the Hasidic\/Haredi communities are doing is educating their children so narrowly as to risk eventual extinction. They are doing so despite having come very close to this end during World War II when their community isolation fatally reduced their ability to respond to devastating threats. They seem to have learned nothing from that traumatic experience. Interestingly, they are not alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In present day America, the Hasidim are extremists on a continuum\u2014a long list of other movements with approximately the same determination to not adapt in the face of change. In the U.S., every school board that tries to restrict teaching about race relations or the realities of gender, every paranoid group that goes after books in a library, every Christian \u201cpatriot\u201d who seeks to replace documentable history in favor of fantasy, and every climate change denier is on the spectrum, so to speak, at one end of which are the Hasidim. And in each case, short term success risks long term demise. There is just nothing in their worldviews that allows for timely adaptation to changing circumstances. In this sense such fantasy-based outlooks, even if temporarily sustainable, ultimately get in the way of the evolutionary principles of survivability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As to the Hasidim, Talmudic scripture by itself certainly cannot guarantee survival. Ignorance, lack of caring about the world around them, finding \u201creality\u201d solely in ancient texts will eventually threaten their community, perhaps fatally. That is a bit of tested scripture that human history as a whole has written.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Educating For Failure\u2014An Analysis (22 July 2023) by Lawrence Davidson Part I\u2014UItra-Orthodox Jews: The Hasidim\/Haredi Most ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects originated [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,28],"tags":[178,36,208,198,71],"class_list":["post-5114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-israel","category-u-s-domestic-affairs","tag-education","tag-israel","tag-survival","tag-ultra-orthodox","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5114"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5116,"href":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5114\/revisions\/5116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}