Friday, February 27, 2009

How NOT to Make the Case for a Yeshiva Education

A commentor on VIN (see comment 8), responding to an article on the proposed Englewood Public School District Hebrew Immersion program writes:

yiden dont get carreid away becasue of a streesed aconymy dont do this to your children, remeber what happened to the people who imigrated and have send their children to public school.

Nothing more to say.

10 comments:

alpidarkomama said...

Oy! Thank you for the erev shabbos chuckle.

Leah Goodman said...

Ah, there are days that I appreciate my 5 years of public school education.

My captcha was "mices."
How apt!

SuperRaizy said...

Wat iz rong wit de coment? It lookz prity smart too mee!

Knitter of shiny things said...

Unfortunately I think this is the norm rather than the exception. Back when I was on Frumster (before giving up on the entire online dating thing) I used to see profiles so atrocious that I wondered if their creators had passed 5th grade English. One could make the argument that this commenter was in a hurry when he/she posted, but you'd think people would care more about the impression they make in a dating site profile...

Anonymous said...

I wonder if that commenter was him/herself an immigrant whose children strayed after they came to the USA? Maybe they are crediting it to not receiving a good Jewish education.

Mark

Am Kshe Oref - A Stiff-Necked People said...

SL, you called it!!! There really IS nothing more to say.

Anonymous said...

Anon,

That is a great limud zchus!

Although of course that comment is atrociously written, I have not noticed any difference in the level of writing of the average yeshiva graduate vs. the average public school graduate.

I have also seen a surprising number of college graduates who cannot write a coherent paragraph.

Ariella's blog said...

Unfortunately, there are plenty of people who have not been sequestered in the yeshiva system who do not care about correctness. I've seen plenty of errors in the SAT essays I score. And even those who have supposedly completed their education, do not necessarily show any greater accomplishment in their writing. Recently, I pointed out some errors in the ad of a very high-priced photographer to him, naively thinking he would then correct them. He merely shrugged them off and tried to make a case for his own sense of how the words should look to justify misplaced commas and missing apostrophes.

ProfK said...

Sorry, but the fact that some public school graduates have no better grasp of English than the commentor has is irrelevant. Once, yeshivas used to brag that their students were better educated than the public school students were. That is so not the case today. At least the public school parents don't have to look at their children and cry over how much personal money was spent on educating them and look how they turned out. Anyone want to guess how much money some parents spent on tuition for the person who tried to write the comment above? They should be asking for their money back.

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, correct grammar and spelling is really a minor issue compared to the horrendous social issues our children would face in public school at the high school level.

I have been told of a NJ public high school in an excellent school district that recently sent a letter home to parents regarding the school's response to a widespread problem regarding EXTREMELY inappropriate behavior - I will not elaborate.

The yeshivot and the Jewish High Schools are not a panacea and the education is extremely challenged as well, however, I can correct spelling, but I cannot fix a corrupted child.

As a proud product of public education myself, I have sought to opt my children out of their prohibitively expensive and inadequate education in the past, but given this paradigm, it is no longer an option.