Recently, I was thinking about how I would define a good formal education. My conclusion: A good formal education is one that leaves the student feeling that he or she has just scratched the service of what there is to know about any particular subject and eager to continue learning long after the degree is firmly in hand. Isaac Newton, arguably the greatest scientific mind in history, once described himself as like a little boy on the seashore who has barely dipped his toes in the great expanse of knowledge.
Of course, that is not the entire definition. A good education should also teach one how to weigh evidence and evaluate conflicting arguments, and how to construct one's own.
The above definition was inspired by two old friends. My best friend from college has become an almost full-time student at St. John's College in Taos, New Mexico, a school emphasizing study of the Great Books. In his seventies, he is busy reading Homer in the original Greek and learning Biblical Hebrew.
And a law school buddy wrote to me recently about a high school English teacher who read Joseph Conrad's story "The Secret Sharer" with the class seven times, extracting new meanings and levels of complexity each time. In retirement, my friend is reading the classics of world literature aloud, very slowly, in order to fully appreciate the author's style. (He has recently published his own first novel to favorable reviews.)
An education that leaves one thirsting for more is increasingly rare today. Already decades ago, Allan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind that fewer and fewer students enter college today excited about the new and exciting ideas to which they are about to be exposed. For them, college is more likely to be viewed as a dispensary of degrees holding the ticket to future material success. Meanwhile colleges and universities compete for students based on the quality of their football teams and the opulence of their Club Med–like facilities.
Though I admire my friends' continued pursuit of knowledge, upon further reflection I realized that nothing comes close to fulfilling my definition so much as a Torah education. At no stage of learning — cheder, yeshivah ketanah, yeshivah, kollel — does any student of Torah ever feel like he has learned enough, much less everything. The commonly used description of a great scholar as "knowing kol haTorah kulo" is, in fact, impossible today, writes the Chazon Ish at the end of Seder Taharos.
Torah learning is a lifetime pursuit, and a powerful bond of one generation to another. At the Shabbos table, parents and children are frequently found debating difficulties in the text and offering new insights and solutions. When a great talmid chacham comes to the neighborhood and gives a public shiur, it is not uncommon to find three generations — from yeshivah bochurim to grandfathers — sitting together to listen to the shiur.
And when it comes to evaluating opposing arguments and prooftexts, nothing can match Talmudic learning.
DAVID FRENCH points to another failure of contemporary secular education ("The Fire of Stupidity Cannot Be Contained," May 31), besides its failure to instill a passion for learning: It has created a generation of young people who are ignorant, in general, and ignorant of even recent history, in particular, including that of their own country.
He laments: "A disturbing number of young people on the right are fascinated with fascism. An extraordinary 34 percent of young people overall express a favorable view of communism, and young Americans are far more likely than their parents to say that political violence is 'sometimes OK.' And hovering over American culture like a dark cloud is the rise of antisemitism on both the left and right."
Of the tens of millions killed by Communist regimes in the USSR, China, and Cambodia, or the more than ten million lost in the Nazis' quest for world domination and the elimination of the Jews, they know nothing. That socialism has again and again failed to lift the standard of living wherever it has been implemented, and has only resulted in the enrichment of a thin slice of party apparatchiks, is unknown to them.
Of the structure the American Constitution or of the sophistication of the arguments on both sides of the ratification debates, American young people know nothing. Whatever the faults, real or imagined, of America, they are completely without the perspective to appreciate the wisdom of Winston Churchill's description of "democracy [as] the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried."
These educational failures bring into sharp focus the genius of Torah education. From a young age, all Torah-educated children learn the foundational events of the Jewish People and review them every year at increasing levels of depth. For them, that history is their own, and they are part of a long chain. When we refer to the Avos as "Avinu," or Moshe, as "Rabbeinu," these terms are not just honorifics, but express our sense of ongoing relationship to these great figures and our privilege to be descended from them.
In short, our Torah study roots us in our past, and thereby provides us with the tools to face the challenges of the future.