I’m not sure if this story is amusing or sad or both. A couple came to a din torah by R’ Shternbruch because this supposed outstanding bachur from Chevron has to ask his wife shaylos because he doesn’t know hil’ shabbos and now his shverr wants to back out of paying for the apartment he promised and divorce is on the horizon. R’ Shternbuch uses this as a springboard to warn guys to learn halacha properly, not just lomdus. Me, being the cynic that I am, am worried that this will lead to a different outcome, namely, that girls’ schools will stop teaching halacha lest the girls end up knowing more than their supposed talmid chacham husbands and end up in a situation like this.
I think that in order to graduate any yeshiva high school, whether chareidi/yeshivish or MO, you should have to pass a test on simple pshat in all of chumash and rashi and pass a test on the halachos of orach chaim on the level of what the Chayei Adam covers. After tens of thousands of education dollars spent and 12+ years worth of classroom instruction, you would think that would be an embarrassingly low expectation, yet all of my kids think that were this an actual requirement, most students would never graduate.
Can you imagine handing a high school diploma to someone who cannot do addition, much less algebra and trig? Or someone who claims they learned how to analyze history and can rattle off different interpretations of the Constitution based on close readings of the Federalist Papers, but who doesn’t know when the Civil War took place? These examples strike us as absurd, but we graduate students who can rattle off some chakira with tzvei dinim to answer a kashe of R’ Akiva Eiger but who don’t know hilchos brachos.
From Divrei Chaim, here.