From: shimoff@umbc4.umbc.edu (Eliot Shimoff)
Subject: Re: O-C-R debate
Organization: University of Maryland Baltimore Campus, Academic Computing Services
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1992 15:16:15 GMT

In article <2319@israel.nysernet.org> warren@nysernet.org writes:
>In <1992Jul23.192739.22976@umbc3.umbc.edu> shimoff@umbc4.umbc.edu (Eliot Shimoff) writes:
>
>>The same argument might be made against afternoon Hebrew schools.
>>If the only form of J. education was yeshivot, then most J. kids
>>would attend, and get solid J. educations.  But now (in the US), 
>>J. parents can meet their "responsibilities" by sending their kids
>>for a few hours a week -- and most J. kids get very little.
>
>Seriously?  I think that if you closed down the Hebrew School and told
>the parents to send the kids to Yeshiva, they'd get Grandpa to teach
>the kids how to do his Haftara, and that would be it.  This would be a
>disaster.

Seriously!  Clearly, this wouldn't work in the US today.  But
in the good old days [:-(] of the shtetl, every boy got a decent
J. education, BECAUSE THERE WERE NO  ALTERNATIVES!  (Education
for girls was a different story ...)

I vaguely remember hearing about day schools in Canada years ago;
because the public schools often taught Christian doctrine, many
(most?) Jewish kids ended up in day schools!  (Any Canadian netters
able to  verify?)

>Parents who want kids with a little bit of Jewish education (but not
>too much, God forbid!), the kind that make life difficult for
>educators in all streams, are not going to send their kids to Yeshiva
>because the Hebrew School is closed, but they might stop going to the
>shul the few times each year that they do.

Consider two communities.  One has  _only_ a day-school (no
watered down 3-hour per week stuff).  Of  100 kids,  fifty attend
the day school, and 40 remain "true to the faith."  The other
community has Hebrew school alternatives:   20 kids attend the
day school, 60 attend the Hebrew school and 20 drop out.  But in
the next generation, only 10 of the Hebrew school graduates remain
"true to the faith."   Which community is better off?

>I thought this analogy would be easier to talk about than OCR.
>However there is a difference.  If we wanted to shoot ourselves in the
>foot, we could choose to close *our* shul's Hebrew School.  We cannot
>choose to close *another* shul's, let alone another shul.

Alas, there is  a Gresham's Law  operating in Jewish education.
The afternoon Hebrew schools used to meet 12 - 15 hours per week,
and the kid learned _something_.  Now they often meet 3 -5 hours
per week, and the  kids learn very little.  (My father once asked
a group of Hebrew school teachers to (a) name any 5 of the Ten
Commandments, (b) name the Five Books of Moses, and (c) name
at least three  Prophets; most of the teachers couldn't do it!.)

The world is a very narrow kollel, and the Hebrew school
principals are getting paranoid!

>-- 
>/|/-\/-\       The entire world		Jerusalem
> |__/__/_/     is a very publishing house ***.
> |warren@      But the weeder
>/ nysernet.org is paranoid.


-- 
Eliot Shimoff                  |    n   n   n
   shimoff@umbc3.umbc.edu      |   X + Y = Z .  Easy to prove no solutions
Ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu ...  |   for n greater than 2.  Darn.  Can't fit
Better luck next year!         |   it into this little .sig file.  Oh well.
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish