RESPONSE: Distracted by COVID

I have never had the pleasure of meeting Rabbi Lenny Matanky, but can attest that there are very few individuals in the world of Jewish education who enjoy as sterling a reputation. I believe, however, that his essay in TraditionOnline’s recent COVID+5 series (“The Impact on Education,” April 22) missed the mark on two levels. First, I think R. Matanky exaggerates the lasting impact of COVID on our students. Perhaps students in American public schools, who spent two years on Zoom, can say that it created damage that continues to today. However, our yeshiva day school students were back in classrooms within a few months. Yes, they were occasionally quarantined and had to wear masks and the like, but I think it would be greatly overstating the case to say that they lost that entire year. R. Matanky concedes that other pre-existing factors exacerbate the situation, such as students’ skills and emotional health, and I would argue that they deserve to be the focus of our discussion. However, second, and much more fundamentally, identifying the cause for an issue in education is only meaningful if it then provides a direction for how to deal with the problem. Even if we grant that COVID is the primary cause for all the issues raised in R. Matanky’s essay, that does not give schools the license to “blame COVID” and move on as if there is nothing that can be done about it. The important discussion needs to be, now that we have identified the issues that were created, about how they might be ameliorated. If we accept that our students have weaker skills, then the question is how we might refocus our classes to encourage more skills work for our students. Let’s grant that COVID was the primary cause of mental health issues and the worst aspects of social media use and consumption merely exacerbates them, it would still behoove us to deal with social media as best we can. Encouraging time limits, discussing how it creates unrealistic expectations, and the like, would be a good place to start.

No doubt schools, including R. Matanky’s own Ida Crown, already do this; but I believe that discussing those types of initiatives is the crucial direction we need to pursue. Too often, looking at erroneous or, at best, partial causes for an issue distracts us from effective solutions. In general, there ought to be a statute of limitations on how long a problem can be blamed on a no longer existing cause. Given sufficient time, it is on the educational institutions to compensate for the issue. If, for example, an Israeli yeshiva or midrasha is still blaming our American high schools for their students’ deficiencies at the end of the year in Israel, the finger-pointing is likely misdirected. Even if COVID created all these issues, by now, schools ought to have found a way to adapt accordingly—and that should be the central discussion.

Rabbi Yaakov Blau teaches at the Frisch School in Paramus, NJ.