… for you. I don’t have this problem, for multiple reasons. I have no legitimate children and unless you people start showing up to my shows or getting me advertisers I’m sending my kids to public school.
But seriously folks, how on earth do poor frummies pay for their house in Flatbush, still pay for pizza at three bucks a slice, and buy products with a jacked up price due to three hechsherim that are probably less kosher then things with triangle K? But you have to keep up with the Cohens and get a shidduch for your daughter who’s still in nursery, and then after all of this drop down absurd amounts of money for a shitty education.
Fact is some may not even call yeshiva an education; I didn’t go to a very good school so I wouldn’t know, but to spend all that money on a school to teach your kid how to sit and learn out of a gemara all day seems pretty stupid. You may say that yeshiva guys go to college, but using your scam credits from night seder to get that degree from FDU or Touro could be done without mortgaging your house.
Then you have these girls’ yeshivas that charge an arm and a leg as well, and all they are preparing the girl for is marriage and a life of baby making and white cloth checking. Do these girls really need to go to school, get all that education just to prepare them for a career as a stenographer or a medical billing assistant?
The above cases are for the really yeshivish crowds, which complain the most or seem like they complain the most because I read the “readers write” section of the Yated every week. A quick look at the more serious blogs will tell you that everyone is complaining about the Yeshiva Tuition Crisis, which is probably causing the shidduch crisis, because picky parents don’t want their kids dating kids of broke ass parents (but the yeshiva tuition costs are breaking the bank so everyone’s broke)
Every year you read about how parents are “threatening” or “thinking” about sending all their kids to the local public school, therefore making their case for vouchers (another animal in itself) They never do anything but talk and discuss the issues, if they actually did pull out all the kids from their local b’nos bais Yaakov and ship them off to public school someone would notice, but the kids would never get a shidduch and the parents would have to avoid the kollel store like the plague.
For one thing I don’t understand why tuition costs so much money but being a Rabbi resigns you to a life of generic brand soda at your shabbos meals and forces you to drive around one of those old station wagons held together with bungee cords and put the brakes on loshon horah stickers? Shouldn’t Rabbis be driving around foreign cars with cd players in them? Shouldn’t yeshiva Rebbes have more then one weekday suit to wear?
Take a look at some of the yeshiva buildings, at least in Far Rockaway they aren’t too shabby, they have these huge complexes made of nice glass with smooth pothole-free parking lots in neighborhoods that exist because the rent is cheap. Then they have these fancy shmancy annual dinners honoring some random modern orthodox couple by the name of Sidney and Shirley Cohen who were solicited by phone to accept the “builders award” which really means they have to buy the emerald page in an ad journal. But still the yeshivas are broke, charge you an arm and a leg and the teachers never get paid on time – like kasharus, it seems like one big scam and since I have been asked multiple time to write about it I figured I would.
Do I have a solution? You can’t just pose a problem without a solution right? Well I don’t really have a good solution, I would send my kids to public school, but I am a progressive dude, and I’m dirt poor and don’t really see the value in yeshiva education. On the flipside I see that the nicest, brightest and most founded in Judaism kids I know were the frum kids whose parents decided to send them to public school. That probably has more to do with the parents, but still, public school is free and as Jews we need to embrace the free.
Furthermore, with the money saved on tuition you could probably have a one room cheder type situation, but just make sure to do a back round check, because one room cheders seem like a great place to molest children.
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