Upset by New York Times expose on Hasidic schools? That's what GOP wants for all American kids

[marmar]

Upset by New York Times exposé on Hasidic schools? That's what GOP wants for all American kids
Here's the GOP endgame: Tax-funded schools that teach religion and propaganda, but not literacy, math or history

By AMANDA MARCOTTE
Senior Writer
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 12, 2022 1:05PM (EDT)


(Salon) 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 Rosenthal write that the schools "have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone."

In the social-media enclave of people who care about New York politics, this story got tons of attention, with people expressing understandable concern about misuse of government funds and children being denied the right to an education that is supposed to be guaranteed by the state. Outside the New York area, however, there probably wasn't much public interest. On its surface, this feels like a local not a national problem: The Hasidic community is relatively small (perhaps 200,000 people in all) and the schools in question are only found in Brooklyn and the northern New York suburbs.

Nonetheless, Americans across the country should pay close attention to this story, and should consider its national implications. The same political pressures and flaws in the educational system that allowed this problem to fester in New York are being exploited across the country by conservative activists, nearly all of whom are Christian rather than Jewish. Worse yet, these Christian activists aren't just interested in keeping their own kids away from secular education. They have grander ambitions, and would like to gut the education system as we know it, to make sure that no one's kids can enjoy the right to a free, robust public education. ....................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2022/09/12/upset-by-the-new-york-times-expos-on-hasidic-schools-thats-what-wants-for-all-american-kids/

[The Blue Flower]

1. Yeshiva madrassah

Last edited Tue Sep 13, 2022, 10:27 AM - Edit history (1)

Same problem: uneducated young men with no future in the real world. Not saying that yeshivas produce terrorists, though.

[hedda_foil]

2. Please read the whole article. Please!

[Chainfire]

3. Religious fanatics, of any faith, are a detriment to society.