Q&A: High School Studies
High School Studies
Question
Have a good week, Rabbi.
Two questions came to mind בעקבות the article you published about the documentary on the Midrasha.
You spoke there about how, in the past, walking around Tel Aviv with a kippah was considered a bold act, and that just seems totally crazy to me. My question is: how much did you personally experience anti-religious sentiment in your interactions with secular people (if you can maybe share some anecdotes?), and what do you think caused the attitude—which in many circles is still very suspicious and dismissive—to become more moderate, or even what caused that sentiment in the first place?
The second thing that interested me in what you wrote is that you say you stayed there and didn’t exactly study there. So my question is: how did you manage to study for years in yeshivas, earn a doctorate in physics, and devote your whole life to study and thought, if in high school you were running off to Tiberias every week? Were you studying in between? Or do the high school years really matter that little when it comes to developing learning skills for the rest of life? This interests me because I’m not exactly very invested in my studies, and I want to know how possible/easy it is to break these bad study habits and from there become a Torah scholar and a scientist?
Answer
This was a period before my time—the 1950s.
Indeed, studies during the high school years are not very important. I also wrote in the column that one of the questions that arises is how important high school studies really are.
A normal person can do all of this in one year of organized study, and even that is far more than what is really needed (except for English, which takes time to absorb). High school studies—and elementary school too—are a waste of time. Mostly babysitting.
It may be more important for some people, but it seems to me that for most people this is the situation. Especially if you do study the harder subjects—science, mathematics, English. As for religious studies, at the Midrasha most really didn’t study much, but even in places where they studied a bit more, usually the graduate knows almost nothing. What he does know comes from his post-high-school studies.
Discussion on Answer
To add to that, I studied in a cheder, did all my matriculation exams over two years in the evenings, after kollel. Since then I’ve advanced and earned a degree, and to this day I still have difficulty with English.
Okay, so maybe my questions and thoughts aren’t as original as I think.
Did the anti-religious sentiment stop after the 1950s?