They write, “As the internet has become more widely available, many schools have grown more restrictive, even barring students whose parents are caught with smartphones.” Oy, how terrible! Imposing standards on your students and parent body in order to comply with the ethos of the school. How un-American can you get? The priests of “freedom” at the New York Times have decided that schools are abusive because they seek to be protected from the ravages of the World-Wide Sewer...
Here is another aspect of the chinuch that vexed the investigative journalists at the Times: “Secular textbooks are either censored with black marker to blot out images of girls or pigs...” Yes, in Western culture today, blotting out images that may not conform with our ideals of modesty can be seen as something from the Dark Ages, despite the fact that, in our opinion, many of the pictures of women exploit them. Aside from that, we follow the “archaic” words of the Torah that state, “Lo sosuru acharei levavchem v’acharei eineichem.”
Charedi schools with fantastic secular studies programs from which graduates go to Harvard or Columbia would also take great care with regard to the images that their boys see, and if they were deemed to be immodest by our standards, not the New York Times’ standard, they would also blot them out. Again, it isn’t our lack of secular standards that vexes them; it is our religiosity that irks them. Clearly, nice Jewish girls and boys like New York Times journalists Eliza Shapiro and Brian Rosenthal feel uncomfortable being associated with unenlightened and grubby Jews, such as us, chareidim.
There is nothing illegal or unethical about letting parents decide what images they want their kids to see. If they don’t like pigs, they don’t have to show them images of pigs either. It’s a free country. I know this makes journalists like Shapiro and Rosenthal and the editorial board of the New York Times feel uncomfortable. To their “enlightened” minds, freedom of expression only goes one way in America today.
