Sunday, May 9, 2021

Compartmentalization and Synthesis in Modern Orthodox Jewish Education

 https://www.thelehrhaus.com/commentary/compartmentalization-and-synthesis-in-modern-orthodox-jewish-education/

 As early as 1986, Jack Bieler argued that “The modern Orthodox school itself is undermining rather than supporting the religious outlook that it should be encouraging within its student body.”[11] Samuel Heilman, in his landmark 2006 study of the American Jewish Orthodox community, describes several factors that have contributed to this reality.[12] First, he notes that with increasing professional specialization and training in fields of medicine, law, and business, Modern Orthodox parents find themselves without the religious training or free time to be actively engaged in the education of their children. As Heilman puts it, “The school had hoped not to replace the family and community, but in practice in the modern world it did.”[13] This growing divide between the roles of parents and teachers – indeed, between school and home – means that students’ lived communal and familial experiences develop separately from their educational encounters; they often learn one thing at school and then see something very different at home. To make matters worse, the very teachers that students engage with at school are often at odds with the core values that Modern Orthodoxy espouses. This reality creates significant additional barriers to communicating a Modern Orthodox worldview within our schools, as Heilman further notes that

the teachers in their schools and many rabbis did not share their values and remained unprepared to endorse the modern orthodox life trajectory even tacitly… the teachers often did not share the same neighborhoods and certainly not the same community as the families of the students they taught.[14]

Indeed, identifying, recruiting, and hiring Modern Orthodox faculty role models (especially for limmudei kodesh classes) is a such a daunting task that Heilman estimates that by 2003 up to two-thirds of Judaic studies teachers in schools were Haredi.

 

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