In this concluding part of the Talmudic triptych, I now continue where I previously left off, comparing the two systems of public education in America: the excellence of the Yeshiva education, reserved for the Jewish schools, and the dumbing-down idiocy of the scholastic method of multiple choice, developed in America in the twentieth century, first as an experiment, to be used only in selective applications, but eventually dumped on every public and most private schools.
No other educational system in the world is more emblematic of the rare marvel called freedom of thought than the Yeshiva system of Talmudic education, teaching young Jews how to think superlatively. And in a highly puzzling occurrence, its exact opposite, promoting intellectual slavery and unquestioning obedience to authority, is the scholastic law of the “land of the free,” the method of multiple choice, ruthlessly forced on the “home of the brave” misguidedly, or most likely deliberately, to enforce teachers' "objectivity" and students' uniformity, by a bunch of controlling freaks, called the American educational establishment.
"Where there are three Jews, there are four opinions," goes the Jewish saying. Intended as a joke, its serious subtext testifies to the liberality of Jewish opinion-making, iconoclastically irreverent to authority and self-doubting, as a matter of principle, not to betray any hesitancy (compensated by its antidote: intellectual in-your-face arrogance and self-assurance of an arguer from the position of strength), but in the best sense of Cartesian De Dubitandum, inaugurating Her Majesty Doubt on the Throne of Philosophy, as the Queen of the Realm.
Every great discovery in science, every momentous breakthrough in human understanding, has been made by a revolutionary radical, rejecting established authority, imposing “my new way” as the right way on the rest of humanity. Such freedom to differ, and to prevail, is essentially consistent with the Talmudic Way of thinking, while at the same time totally inimical to the system of multiple choice.
Jesus, in His attack on the established Jewish authority, used the same method of thinking, which obviously predates the Talmud and characterizes Talmudic thinkers of all ages. The Catholic Church may have learned some elements of that thinking, and used its own version in the Catholic schools of America, which today may be the only places, outside the Yeshiva, to receive a decent education, although not quite on a par with the Jewish schools.
As for the rest of the schools in the City upon a Hill, God save America from her discreditable mentors!
No other educational system in the world is more emblematic of the rare marvel called freedom of thought than the Yeshiva system of Talmudic education, teaching young Jews how to think superlatively. And in a highly puzzling occurrence, its exact opposite, promoting intellectual slavery and unquestioning obedience to authority, is the scholastic law of the “land of the free,” the method of multiple choice, ruthlessly forced on the “home of the brave” misguidedly, or most likely deliberately, to enforce teachers' "objectivity" and students' uniformity, by a bunch of controlling freaks, called the American educational establishment.
"Where there are three Jews, there are four opinions," goes the Jewish saying. Intended as a joke, its serious subtext testifies to the liberality of Jewish opinion-making, iconoclastically irreverent to authority and self-doubting, as a matter of principle, not to betray any hesitancy (compensated by its antidote: intellectual in-your-face arrogance and self-assurance of an arguer from the position of strength), but in the best sense of Cartesian De Dubitandum, inaugurating Her Majesty Doubt on the Throne of Philosophy, as the Queen of the Realm.
Every great discovery in science, every momentous breakthrough in human understanding, has been made by a revolutionary radical, rejecting established authority, imposing “my new way” as the right way on the rest of humanity. Such freedom to differ, and to prevail, is essentially consistent with the Talmudic Way of thinking, while at the same time totally inimical to the system of multiple choice.
Jesus, in His attack on the established Jewish authority, used the same method of thinking, which obviously predates the Talmud and characterizes Talmudic thinkers of all ages. The Catholic Church may have learned some elements of that thinking, and used its own version in the Catholic schools of America, which today may be the only places, outside the Yeshiva, to receive a decent education, although not quite on a par with the Jewish schools.
As for the rest of the schools in the City upon a Hill, God save America from her discreditable mentors!
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