NY Hasidic group demands right to only religious education

[SteveG]

Spock wrote:
It is not the purpose of education to turn children into ignorant bigoted clones of their parents.

The Supreme Court will probably disagree with you.

[gadje]

fine with me, as long as they move to their own country.

here in the USA, we cannot tolerate ignorant people.

[Fritz]

let them sit in jail then.
we have enough stoopit people living in the 1950s, we don't need the 1500s too.

[Ombligo]

It's an interesting point/counterpoint situation. I'm not about to offer up an opinion because I could argue both sides equally. However, the schools should not receive funding if they will not meet the standards required.

[cbelt3]

gadje wrote:
fine with me, as long as they move to their own country.

here in the USA, we cannot tolerate ignorant people.

Alas, one political party embraces and encourages them…

[graylocks]

Janit wrote:
Do you know which particular groups do this? The popular press tends to use the term Hasidim to mean all Hasidim, as well as all Haredim.

The NYT article repeatedly states that it is not all Hasidic schools but some of the ultra observant ones. It still is affecting large numbers of children and it seems boys are more affected than girls.

[Ca Bob]

I think it's reasonable to argue that children need protection from the more extreme and dangerous practices of some parents -- I'm referring specifically to parents who refuse to allow medical care for potentially lethal infectious diseases such as meningitis. There are also cases where children have died from potentially curable childhood cancers, again due to refusal on the part of the parents.

In this case, I would submit that there is a legitimate question as to whether something analogous is going on, in the sense that the children are being kept ignorant of a major part of our civilization. Particularly when the children are being kept ignorant of the subject we used to call civics, there is a serious issue. The need for an informed electorate is one of our founding principles.

Our civilization puts limits on religious practice. We draw the line at ritual murder and child beating (not to mention wife beating) and I suspect that most child protection agencies would intervene when parents raise their children as Nazis and the equivalent. We also require vaccination -- for another reason, having to do with protecting the rest of the public.

The question here, it would seem to me, is whether the most extreme practices are detrimental to the children because the children are deprived of some critically important choices because they are deprived of the knowledge that these choices exist. There is a second, equally important question, namely whether such practices create enclaves that are a danger to the democratic functioning of the city and the state. For example, are the children kept ignorant of the principle of separation of church and state (seems unlikely) and are they kept ignorant of American history (seems likely) along with basic arithmetic and all that.

[Acer]

The Amish limit schooling to eighth grade. The limit is set to be sufficient to operate within the Amish community, where vocations are primarily manual. On the other hand, they take no public dollars.

[gadje]

Acer wrote:
The Amish limit schooling to eighth grade. The limit is set to be sufficient to operate within the Amish community, where vocations are primarily manual. On the other hand, they take no public dollars.

And that is fine with me. I visited Amish farms and Mennonite and those are fine with me as they do not take public dollars and they do not make protests like these.

[mattkime]

There's nothing surprising about this. Its the consequence of having a special interest group that votes en masse for a single candidate. If you live near them long enough you see the surprising ways in which the rules don't quite apply to them the way they do to everyone else. When they don't like certain city policies they have a way of changing things through secretive processes.

They're religious zealots who want to wall themselves off except when the state has something to offer, usually money. They're happy to take our money.

NYC politics is a special kind of awful.