We already lost the battle in academia back in elementary school

Originally published in Makor Rishon:
https://www.makorrishon.co.il/opinions/article/165401

The integration of Haredim into academia is not really succeeding, and that is no accident. A policy of agreed-upon solutions with the sector’s leaders can work only if both sides recognize the problem and want to solve it

The findings of the State Comptroller’s report, recently published and dealing with the state’s investment in supplementary education for Haredim and their integration into academia, reveal a grim and above all frustrating picture. It turns out that billions of shekels are being invested in the project of integrating Haredim into academia, yet it is yielding no results. Every so often we are shown an article about a graduate of Haredi education who managed to integrate into high-tech or academia, but these are anecdotes. The data tell a completely different story. It should be remembered that the data mentioned there deal only with budgets that pass through the Council for Higher Education. The real sums – drawn from many sources, public and private, and invested in guidance programs, educational catch-up, special scholarships, and the like – are far larger.

Not only do these investments fail to advance Haredi education and integration, but typically this money serves mainly to perpetuate the problem and deepen it. A large portion of it is invested in failed attempts to integrate Haredim into fields that admittedly have some added value (although almost no Haredim go into the natural sciences and engineering; they cannot meet the demands), but most of them drop out because of various constraints and a lack of fit. Another portion is invested in expanding useless "education" that would have taken place anyway, such as teacher training for Haredi institutions. These institutions do not need teachers in such numbers, and even if they did, those teachers would perpetuate the problem, since it is rooted in those very institutions. In the end, good intentions to help Haredim save themselves from themselves are thrown in the trash and mainly serve those who create the problem in order to deepen it even further.

This is also the place to mention the ongoing efforts of the Haredi leadership to keep that same funding away from those who leave Haredi society. These young people went through Haredi education with all its obstacles and received no tools for life, chose to leave Haredi society and try to integrate into broader society, and precisely they receive nothing from all this abundant funding. Well, what did you expect – they would actually use it for the purposes for which it is truly intended, so why should they be given any money?

There are many lessons to be drawn from the report’s findings. I will mention here the two main ones, in my view. The first is that, as far as success in academia is concerned, the battle was already lost in elementary school. It is difficult, almost impossible, to bridge years of ignorance through slapdash crash programs lasting a few months. These programs involve waiving academic requirements and creating low-threshold tracks, and it is unclear how they receive academic approval (and of course they do not satisfy the principle of equality, since other students are held to higher criteria and are not given similar subsidies), and the results speak for themselves. Even these easy tracks are not completed by many of the students, and all our money goes to waste.

The second lesson is that one must not let the cat guard the cream. When corrective programs are entrusted to the Haredi leadership and one seeks solutions acceptable to it, the result is failure. Their interest is to sabotage all the programs while using the money for their own purposes, that is, to deepen the problem. Here we are not only letting the cat guard the cream; we are actually letting it produce the cream. One must understand that the Haredi leadership did not suddenly run into an unforeseen problem that we need to help it cope with. It created the problem. Therefore, allowing it to devise and lead the solution is a scandalous policy. Einstein already said that insanity is trying again and again something that did not work and expecting a different result. Here the insanity is far greater. We are trying a solution that is clearly doomed from the outset and will even aggravate the problem.

The main lesson is much broader. Agreed-upon solutions are an excellent policy, but such a policy can work only if both sides recognize the problem and want to solve it. In such a case, it is certainly worth looking for solutions and helping those in distress emerge from it. But when one side is itself the problem, it is impossible, and wrong, to look for an agreed solution. The Haredi leadership is not only the problem – it feeds off its very existence. Paying them to help them solve the problem is willful blindness. The leaders of the Haredi public would be willing to pay you to perpetuate these gaps, because Haredi identity means separatism from the world and from society, and that requires perpetuating distress and deepening the social and economic dependence of the ordinary Haredi on the establishment and on the leadership. If the Haredi leadership feeds off the existence of the problem, then expecting it to be part of the solution is a head-in-the-sand policy. This is true of the issue of military conscription, and it is also true of the question of integration into the economy and society. Good people strive for an agreed solution, but they do not understand that this is not the kind of problem to which such a policy can be applied.

We ourselves are perpetuating the problem, and the large sums transferred to solve it are part of that. The right course in such cases is to take harsh measures, above all by cutting off funding through all the creative channels by which Haredim draw money from society. We must stop funding Haredi education, its institutions, its public enterprises, and Haredi society in general. Such a policy may force ordinary Haredim to rise up against their own leadership, which chokes them with an iron hand, and thereby save themselves from themselves. True, usually a prisoner cannot free himself from prison, but when he himself built the prison, only he can save himself from it. Other rescue attempts will sink him deeper into his own mud.