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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38759 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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It keeps on saying "public money" but what does this actually mean?

Finally I find it

Tax dollars are not supposed to go toward religious education. But public agencies pay private schools to comply with government mandates and manage social services. Hasidic boys’ yeshivas, like other private schools, access dozens of such programs, collecting money that subsidizes their theological curriculum.

The details are vague, I expect on purpose. The NYT can surely clear this up but are not so they deserve no bonus points for confusion.

It feels like the government wants to make sure kids have enough to eat, so they pay schools money to do stuff like free school breakfast. And we call this "public funding."

The schools serving the very poorest children will simultaneously have the most "public funding" as well as the worst scores.

At that point the article should never have been written.

It feels like the government wants to make sure kids have enough to eat

Of course not. Americans are free to elect pro wrestlers or turn their libraries into sleeping quarters for the homeless, but the stated purpose of the library is still providing access to books. And feeding children isn't the point of education. Education is, i.e. ensuring at the minimum that children learn basic skills needed to navigate the broader society (like, literally read signs, understand arithmetic, handle elementary instructions, speak the common tongue – do things only a foreign premodern peasant thrown into the middle of Manhattan won't be able to). This is a very low bar and, if the NYT is to be trusted (which I guess they can be, here – authors seem to be sincerely distressed with the kneecapped condition of their kin), it is not reached, leaving kids helpless and forced to depend on the unaccountable and overbearing religious community.

So the outrage is legitimate: this is defrauding the state.

the point of education

This is a more complicated issue than it might appear.

American schools serve a complicated role as an educator, babysitter, and social service.

Some of that falls under “necessary skills” in terms of socialization and, in theory, physical fitness. Other parts are more vaguely prosocial, keeping children at desks instead of selling hypothetical drugs. And there is a surprisingly broad category of benefits to parents, especially if they are not part of a traditional household. The single mother or the dual-income couple is better able to participate in the economy.

Feeding children is mainly in the middle category, It is a reasonably means tested and selective way to keep the poorest from starving. But it also helps compensate for poor or overcrowded households, reducing their food costs. And, even more tenuously, the program is supposed to maintain nutrition with obvious benefits to society.

So, even though it is barely coupled to the creation of educated citizens, school food programs serve a number of widely accepted social roles.

I remember reading a story about how in a certain area, the kids were declared to be special needs and that they would be sent to a school for children with such disabilities, and it was set up that way, but it was a yeshiva. They got public funding for special needs education and funnelled it to religious education in order to bypass laws about that. And the objections are not "they are getting public funding for special projects like other schools", but that "they get onto school boards and get voted in to be the majority members, then they start diverting all the funding to their yeshivas and stripping out funding for the secular schools". You're right that the NYT has to prove this happens, but you're not representing the story correctly with "this article should never have been written, this is just the same as funding for free meals for underprivileged kids".

This is a very touchy subject, because it's very easy to make a mis-step and fall right into stereotypes about 'the Jews'. But I think it's evident that the Hasidim are, in effect, what would be called a cult elsewhere and that even within Judaism they're on an extreme edge. They do think of the outside world, the Gentiles, as foreigners and strangers among whom they live, and so despoiling them is permissible because it's the spoils of Egypt.

the Hasidim are, in effect, what would be called a cult elsewhere

I give you the Rogan Formulation:

1: In a cult, it's run by one guy who knows the whole thing is bullshit.

2: In a religion, that guy died.

Tax dollars are not supposed to go toward religious education.

That's a line that caught my attention, because I recall there being a very recent Supreme Court decision saying that that principle mustn't be taken too far. Indeed: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-1088_dbfi.pdf

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