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I’ve come slowly to understand what it is I really teach: A curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency. I teach how to fit into a world I don’t want to live in.
I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t train children to wait to be told what to do; I can’t train people to drop what they are doing when a bell sounds; I can’t persuade children to feel some justice in their class placement when there isn’t any, and I can’t persuade children to believe teachers have valuable secrets they can acquire by becoming our disciples. That isn’t true.
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.
An exaggeration? Hardly. Parents aren’t meant to participate in our form of schooling, rhetoric to the contrary. My orders as schoolteacher are to make children fit an animal training system, not to help each find his or her personal path.
The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows from the faith that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid.
That idea passed into American history through the Puritans. It found its “scientific” presentation in the bell curve, along which talent supposedly apportions itself by some Iron Law of biology.
It’s a religious idea and school is its church. New York City hires me to be a priest. I offer rituals to keep heresy at bay. I provide documentation to justify the heavenly pyramid.
Socrates foresaw that if teaching became a formal profession something like this would happen. Professional interest is best served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating laity to priesthood. School has become too vital a jobs project, contract-giver and protector of the social order to allow itself to be “re-formed.” It has political allies to guard its marches.
That’s why reforms come and go – without changing much. Even reformers can’t imagine school much different.
David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can’t tell which one learned first — the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I will label Rachel “learning disabled” and slow David down a bit, too.
For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won’t outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, “special education.” After a few months she’ll be locked into her place forever.
In 26 years of teaching rich kids and poor, I almost never met a “learning disabled” child; hardly ever met a “gifted and talented” one, either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by the human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling.
That’s the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation.
There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We don’t need state-certified teachers to make education happen–that probably guarantees it won’t.
How much more evidence is necessary? Good schools don’t need more money or a longer year; they need real free-market choices, variety that speaks to every need and runs risks. We don’t need a national curriculum, or national testing either. Both initiatives arise from ignorance of how people learn or deliberate indifference to it.
I can’t teach this way any longer. If you hear of a job where I don’t have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. Come fall I’ll be looking for work, I think.
John Taylor Gatto wrote this article for The Wall Street Journal, July 25th, 1991. Gatto was a New York State Teacher of the Year. An advocate for school reform, Gatto’s books include Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, the Underground History of American Education and Weapons of Mass Instruction.
[Editors’ note: As we promised, here is a different POV on the electoral upset in the Beit Shemesh mayoral race]
by Yoni Samber
My story has some similarities to David Kasten’s. After growing up in Hollywood, California, in the 80’s and 90’s while attending yeshiva throughout, I landed in Israel in 1996 to begin the adult stage of my life. I spent four years in two wonderful chareidi yeshivas prior to getting married in 2000. (Point of interest to those keeping track of current chareidi affairs: Rav Shmuel Auerbach zt”l was our mesader kedushin).Two years later, we moved our growing family to Ramat Beit Shemesh Alef (RBSa)where we have been ever since. I spent the first eight years of our marriage learning in a chareidi halacha kolel before training to be a paramedic (ALS) in the great state of Texas. It took me two years to get my Hebrew up to par before I was able to get my Israeli license, but it was all worth it just for the looks I get when someone is having the worst day of their life and they look up to see this big American chareidi fellow there to help them.
I was going to address my grievances against Mr. Kasten’s submission at this point, but I feel that one can not fully comprehend some of the dynamics at play here in Beit Shemesh without some history. When we came here in 2002, Danni Vaknin was mayor. A local career politician, the anglo chareidi consensus of the time in this neighborhood was not positive. He was (allegedly) corrupt, not interested in helping frum elements, and intent on preventing chareidim from settling in the planned Shachar neighborhood (now known as RBS gimmel). Mayor Vaknin was ousted by Moshe Abutbul in 2008, to the joy of chareidim in this city. The Abutbul administration, supported by a razor-thin majority of chareidi councilmen, launched in 2009, amidst pledges to represent the good of all city residents. I made a point to pick up all free local Hebrew newspapers outside of the local makolet every Friday, so I could get a feel for what was going on. It did not bode well from the beginning, when the Gimmel party forced him to keep the Tov party’s Eli Freedman (the sole councilman elected to represent working chareidim) out of the coalition. But the feeling in old Beit Shemesh was one of cautious hope that the mayor would be fair to everyone.
That hope came crashing down late that spring, when Abutbul’s czar of housing and development, Moshe Montag, unveiled new plans for RBS gimmel. The media and elected officials from old Beit Shemesh exploded. Gone were plans for a lake and any other of the things designed to make this attractive to non chareidi residents. This was, in their view, a blatant attempt to permanently alter the electorate in order to prevent them from ever electing a non- chareidi mayor again. Abutbol had a plan for this. He would give his word to split the new neighborhood in three-chareidi, DL, and general (chiloni). With this promise in hand, the council voted to develop RBS gimmel. It was a matter of weeks before the agreement unraveled. Montag was determined and unapologetic. It was against the law and discriminatory to prevent anyone from living where they wanted, went the argument. The people of old Beit Shemesh watched as RBS gimmel went from a future for everybody, to Abutbul’s and Gimmel’s (the party) future.
That is how it all started. Abutbol had shown his true colors, and while he got his hilltop, he squandered the good will that was extended to him on credit.
The Great Orot Banot Catastrophe of 2011 was even more telling. The sequence of events was documented at length in English and on YouTube, so I will spare all of us the agony of rehashing it. But know this: Abutbol’s approach of speaking of problems “on both sides” (read- Charlottesville) was a complete disaster for Beit Shemesh, and for chareidim beyond our city. If he would have taken charge and said the obvious from the beginning, namely that there was one very wrong side here, then the whole thing would have finished in August a few days after it started. Instead, he looked elsewhere, as girls were spat on and yelled at on and off until the story went national in December. The results are known. Israel has never been the same. Draft laws were changed after Yeish Atid was swept into office, ultimately leading to the Peleg split, and non-stop tension between religious and secular ever since.
After Eli Cohen’s final defeat in March 2014, Mayor Abutbul pretty much had free rein to do what he wanted. More chareidi neighborhoods have popped up everywhere. The Golevences or Ramat Avraham area looks like RBS bet on steroids, with all that implies. And no one really likes to talk about the maps that show a planned expansion west of Nahar Yarden that would double the size of that troubled neighborhood. The incidents of rocks and boulders placed in my way as I drive through on Shabbos to attempt to help patients in cardiac arrest IN THEIR OWN COMMUNITY indicates to just what level Torah has been distorted there. I have spoken to first responders who have been outright stoned on their way to help. Other documented incidents included an uptick in incidents in which frum soldiers from the community were harassed and assaulted. Large signs intended to intimidate women appeared without challenge. In each reported incident, the Mayor’s response was canned and pitifully inadequate: While we condemn all violence and intimidation, the police are responsible for law and order, not the mayor.
What was noticeably different in his last term was that the funding that he swore the national government would give us wasn’t quite working out the way he had promised. New communities like RBS gimmel remain construction zones to this day, with vital public services like schools, parks, a womans mikva and basic transportation worked out on the fly – if at all. The state of affairs at the city welfare office is one that I am embarrassed to admit I had not been aware of until I read the replies to Mr. Kasten’s letter.
Which brings me back to Mr. Kasten’s submission. What he has written is sadly representative of the sentiments of thousands of (but not all of) chareidim in our city. I know this because aside from my diligence in reading Temura and Keren Or(since defunct), I have invested countless hours, tears and increases in diastolic blood pressure to read the Chadash propoganda machine that has, both to my wife’s and the paper recycling man’s dismay, increased substantially in thickness since 2002. I have struggled to understand all perspectives so that I can be an educated consumer when it comes to voting, but also to be able to relate to the people of this city better. ( I always joked that if you balance the fake news of the Chadash against the rhetoric of the Keren Or, you end up with the closest thing to the truth in the Temura).
Mr. Kasten’s piece assumes malign motives in anyone running against his candidate. He has no doubt that they are out to get us, to suck us defenseless chareidim away from our God and into their schmutz filled orbit of hedonism and movie theatres and army. My line of work has brought me into direct contact with every walk of life in Bet Shemesh, from Moroccans to Ethiopians, the Dati of old Darom to the arsim of the Tayelet and Ayalon Park.
How dare you, Mr. Kasten? How dare you accuse any non-chareidi party or group of “hating Judaism and any thing to do with it?” In my sixteen years here I have NEVER met a SINGLE Jew in this city that fits anything close to such a description. Even Richard Peres, public enemy number one in this city among chareidim, does not want all yeshivas closed or bachurim who are truly learning drafted. I know that because I shmoozed with him once when he was my patient.
Whom have you spoken to? Have you ever tried to get to know Dr Finkelstein? I never met her, but please understand that not every women who has suffered abuse at the hands and mouths of Chareidi-dressed thugs, and who refuses to take it, necessarily becomes a “known rabid anti- religious activist.” (Unless of course the religion you are practicing involves intimidation and harassment of women, then I guess you could get away with calling her anti religious. So I really need to ask you, neighbor, “What religion are you practicing? Because I do not recognize it. It is certainly NOT what I saw and fell in love with in 1996, and committed the rest of my life to. Is using a chareidi epithet against the brave victim of an assault-whom you have never met-your idea of the kedusha you crave? Not taking into account the aspects of forbidden speech.
You have bought into an imaginary, paranoid world that mongers fear and feeds off of some delusion that all non chareidim are out to get us. Circle the wagons! Praise G-d and pass the ammunition! Only a person or a society that is insecure feels the need to fall back on such a perpetual state of war.
Other respondents have addressed how you repeatedly refer to Dr Bloch as not Orthodox. What an utter humiliation to chareidim everywhere that here, for all the world to see, a man makes no effort to conceal what too many chareidim think, but usually have the self respect to keep to themselves- any non chareidi person or sect is not truly Torah observant. I have heard this said before, but to see it written in public is simply bone chilling. Is this the spiritual aliya, the “ideal” that you had in mind when you came here? You have shown how spiritually bankrupt your ideals are. Your follow-up comment that defends applying the “not-frum” epithet to married women who do not cover their hair (to your satisfaction) is astounding. Woe to the generation that transmits such values to their children!
Separation of church and state? Lets talk about that. The obligation to struggle to be a good Jew is not dependant on the help or hindrance of the Israeli government, national or local. So even if a non-frum or anti-frum politician takes the reins of power for a while, I will double down and work harder to strengthen my spiritual roots and branches. I will encourage my family to fight harder to develop and intensify our relationship with G-d during the transitory period that we will endure. If the government is not giving money for kashrus or school, then we will have to pay for it ourselves, just like we did in the good old days .Only a man who has been hopelessly dependent on government handouts for most of his adult life would be too overwhelmed to step up to the plate and empower himself to take his fate into his own hands. It does not have to be that way, and I am not embarrassed to go on record to say I trust Dr Bloch not to destroy Judaism. Not over five years, and not ever. And to those that say that, yes she might be ok, but what if she is pressured by anti-chareidi people in her coalition?” I answer that this is where strength of character come into play. I trust her. She has not betrayed my trust like Mayor Abutbul has for ten years.
This leads to the next point. Separation of church and state can carry over to the compartmentalizing of ruchnius and gashmius. In the US it is easier to fall into a mindset of “my money is my money, and my ruchnius is my ruchnius.” When you come to Eretz Yisrael, your perspective of the two changes. You feel elevated ruchnius, and you realize how important that ruchnius is. If you develop a proper Torah perspective, you start to value essential gashmius fundamentals such as parnassa, basic food, safety from theft or terrorism, functioning public transportation, lit sidewalks free of obstacles and so on as not as just some gashmius need, but as a spiritual need! The spiritual ruchnius could not exist without all these things. And this is one of the merits of living here- even the gashmius pursuits are elevated to a ruchani level. By failing in all areas of essential gashmius, our very ruchnius is threatened. How can I send my son to learn Torah in yeshiva when the iriya could not find the money to provide an armed guard outside his school? How can I get to kollel if chalila I am maimed in a head on collision on Nachal Tzealim due to reckless traffic changes that have persisted for months? How could my wife go to the mikva Friday night for two years if we would live in gimmel? How can I explain to my Bais Yaakov daughters that we have a chareidi mayor, endorsed by gedolei Yisrael, who has done nothing to prevent or discourage the abhorrent treatment of frum women going about their business in rama bet? How can I explain to my children that the gedolei Yisrael instructed their followers to vote for a party in which their number two man was arrested for multiple cases of bribery and abuse of public funds?
And you have the audacity to boil it all down to one less soda can in the street? Moshe Abutbul and his Gimmel party of shame are in fact the greatest threat to ruchnius in this city.
The good news is, the Torah and the Jewish people will survive them. I can only hope that David and the thousands of like-minded chareidim can survive the attitudes that are manifest in his letter.
A final point. Last Friday night, a young Rav addressed his audience in a local shtiebel and related the following. At a public event several years ago, the mayor said, “This city is not under my control, it is under direct control of the cities rabonnim.” Can you imagine that?, he continued. Where else in the world can such a thing be said? he wondered in awe. I sat there quietly, thinking about what he said. And I found myself going back to a cold day last January, the morning after my kids had surprised me with a surprise birthday party when I got home from work after 11:30pm. After dropping them off at school, I suddenly found myself standing over the body of a six year old boy. His father had been rushing him to school, holding his hand as they crossed the street on a crosswalk at Sorek and Kishon. A bus rounded the corner and hit both of them. The father suffered a broken leg. His son did not suffer. He was dragged under the bus and killed.
I will never forget seeing the boy’s hand and remembering a hand the same size – that of my six year old son as hugged me when he woke me up that morning. The angelic, pure, peaceful face of the boy who was killed will be forever burned into my memory.
And I thought back to the newspaper articles in the Chadash, going back eight years when Yisrael Silverstein was not on the council, but as a Degel activist was assigned to be responsible for traffic flow and safety. How he spoke about that very intersection, about its jams and dangers to pedestrians. And how nothing had changed since then. And I thought about how twice after this tragedy the Chadash reported how the same man was back, this time with a team of experts from wherever, and how they were determined that blah blah blah…
And it is ten months later and nothing has changed there.
And the young rav continued on about rabonnim and Daas Torah. Wait a minute! If the rabonnim have direct control of the city, maybe we just had the wrong email address all these years! Maybe they bear some responsibility for this mess?
If what this rav said is accurate, then the rabonnim of this town who campaigned for this mayor three times over the last ten years should at least organize a symbolic egla arufa ceremony at the corner and say “Yadeinu lo shafchu es ha-dam ha-zeh!” Our hands did not shed this blood. Except that it would be dishonest.
If there was ever a greater challenge to emunas chachamim – the emunas chachomim that all of us crave and desperately need now -I have yet to see it.
הגאון הצדיק הרב יוסף שני מסביר על מה חרב בית המקדש ועל הרבנים שצריך להיזהר מהם למי שרוצה לראות את השיעור המלא ממנו לקוח קטע וידיאו זה – שילחץ כאן https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSjRk…
The Western media coverage devoted to the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi proves the cynical adage that one person’s death is a tragedy, while millions of deaths are a mere statistic.
During the past four weeks since Khashoggi went missing at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, the case has been constantly in the news cycle. Contrast that with the sparse coverage in Western news media of the horrific Saudi war in Yemen during the past four years.
The United Nations has again recently warned that 16 million in Yemen were facing death from starvation as a result of the war waged on that country by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Arab partners, with the crucial military support of the US, Britain and France. That imminent death toll hardly registered a response from Western media or governments.
Last week, some 21 Yemeni workers at a vegetable packing plant near the Red Sea port of Hodeida were killed after US-backed Saudi warplanes launched air strikes. Again, hardly any condemnation was registered by Western governments and media pundits.
Admittedly, some politicians in the US and Europe are lately expressing disdain over the Saudi-led war and the possible culpability of Western governments in crimes against humanity.
Nevertheless, in proportion to the public concern devoted to the killing of Jamal Khashoggi there is a staggering indifference in relation to Yemen. How is possible that the fate of one man can provoke so much emotion and angst, while millions of children in Yemen appear to be shrugged off as “collateral damage”.
Partly, the circumstances of Khashoggi’s murder by a Saudi death squad are more easily visualized. His connections as a journalist working for the Washington Post also ensures ample interest from other media outlets. Photos of the 59-year-old Saudi dissident and his personal story of going to the consulate in Istanbul to obtain official papers for an upcoming wedding to his Turkish fiancée also provided a human identity, which then garners public empathy.
Another factor is the macabre plot to trap him, torture and dismember his body by a Saudi hit team who appear to have been acting on orders from senior Saudi regime officials. Khashoggi’s bodily remains have yet to be recovered which adds to the interest in the grisly story.
Regrettably, these human dimensions are all-too often missing in the massive suffering inflicted on Yemen. Thousands of children killed in air strikes and millions perishing from disease and starvation have an abstract reality.
When Western media do carry rare reports on children being killed, as in the Saudi air strike on a school bus on August 9, which massacred over 50, the public is still relatively insensate. We are not told the victims’ names nor shown photographs of happy children before their heinous fate.
However, the contrast between one man’s death and millions of abstract deaths – all the more salient because the culprits are the same in both cases – is not due simply to human callousness. It is due to the way Western media have desensitized the Western public from their appalling lack of coverage on Yemen.
The Western media have an urgent obligation because their governments are directly involved in the suffering of Yemen. If the Western media gave appropriately more coverage with human details of victims then it is fair to assume that there would be much greater public outrage over Yemen and an outcry for justice – at least in the form of halting arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Such calls are being made over the Khashoggi case. Surely, the same calls for economic and diplomatic sanctions should therefore be made with regard to Yemen – indeed orders of magnitude greater given the much greater scale of human suffering.
The Western news media have been shamefully derelict in reporting on Yemen’s horror over the past four years. One of the most despicable headlines was from the BBC which described it as a “forgotten war”. The conflict is only “forgotten” because the BBC and other Western news outlets have chosen to routinely drop it from their coverage. That omission is without doubt a “political” decision taken in order to not discomfit Washington, London or Paris in their lucrative arms trade with the Saudi regime.
Another way at looking at the paradox of “one death a tragedy, a million a statistic” and the Western media’s nefarious role in creating that paradox is to consider the fate of individuals facing death sentences in Saudi Arabia.
Take the case of female pro-democracy protester 29-year-old Israa al Ghomgham. Israa was arrested three years ago because she participated in peaceful protests against the Saudi monarchy. She and her husband Moussa al Hashem are facing execution any day by decapitation. Their only “crime” was to participate in non-violent street demonstrations in Saudi’s eastern provincial city of Qatif, calling for democratic rights for the Sunni kingdom’s oppressed Shia minority.
Another case is that of Mujtaba al Sweikat. He also is facing death by beheading, again because he was involved in pro-democracy protests against the absolute Saudi rulers. What makes his case even more deplorable is that he was arrested in 2012 at the age of 17 – legally a minor – when he was leaving the country to take up studies at Western Michigan University in the United States.
It is not clear if these individuals – and there are many more such cases on Saudi death row – will be spared by the Saudi monarchy in the light of the international condemnations over the Khashoggi killing. Any day, they could be hauled to a public square and their heads hacked off with a sword.
If we try to explain the disconnect in Western public reaction to the Khashoggi case, on one hand, and on the other, the massive misery of Yemen, one might invoke the cynical adage about a single death versus millions. But then how does that explain the apparent lack of public concern over the imminent death of individuals such as Israa al Ghomgham, her husband Moussa, or the student Mujtaba al Sweitat?
The tragedy of desensitized abstraction is not due to overwhelming numbers. It is primarily due to the willful omission – and worse, misinformation – by Western media on the barbarity of the Saudi regime and the crucially enabling support given to this regime by Western politics and economics.
The apparent disconnect is due to systematic Western media distortion. That’s not just a flaw. It is criminal complicity.
