With the subject of teacher salaries at the forefront of the communal conversation, I am wondering if there is a basic flaw in our system that should be addressed. Specifically, I wonder why the majority of people opening our schools and running them are not bnei torah who are looking to be marbitz torah but are rather baalei batim. Think about it for a moment: the deans and administrators of schools ultimately have the last word in every decision that goes into chinuch. Do you want someone who is a lifelong ben torah to be making those decisions or a baalebus? Who is calling the shots in schools and who paskens the shaalos? I have a hard time believing that it’s the dean’s moreh derech – what does he know about running a school, right? Why have we become so complacent at the idea of a baalebus deciding what the chinuch of our children looks like? It’s beyond my comprehension. Furthermore, many parents don’t know anything about the people who are in charge of the schools. They know nothing of their hashkafos, they know nothing about whether they are ehrliche yidden, they know nothing about how the school’s revenue is accounted for. Would you allow food into your house on Pesach about which you know nothing about? Would you eat a food whose hechsher you never heard of? Then why would we send the most impressionable people in our society – our young children – to be guided by people that we know literally nothing about? Isn’t it ludicrous? Last but not least, many of the school owners are quite wealthy. Why is it acceptable that the cleaning ladies that dust their mansions are making more money than our children’s teachers – and sometimes their rebbeim too? Why would we want to send our children to a school whose owners apparently care more about ensuring that their home (or homes) are meticulously kept than ensuring that the people giving their hearts and souls to our children’s chinuch are well compensated? You want to know the answer to all of the above? It’s quite simple. We do all that because we’ve been told to toe the line. Follow orders, left, right, left, right. Don’t forget you’re a sheep in a pen. And if you want to get your crumbs, you better follow along. Name withheld, Lakewood, NJ NOTE: The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of YWN. DO YOU HAVE AN OPINION YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE POSTED ON YWN? SEND IT TO US FOR REVIEW. (YWN World Headquarters – NYC) (YWN World Headquarters – NYC)
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