The Final Post on Women's Education

Because this blog has become a springboard for many of the conversations in my real life, I have been speaking about women’s education a lot this past week. As a result a lot of new and insightful observations have been related to me as well as things that I’ve known all along, but needed to be reminded of desperately. Seeing as I’ve pretty much exhausted this topic, at least for the meantime, I hope this compilation of points that have come up can serve as some sort of conclusion. Hopefully there will not be another post about this for a VERY long time.
(I’ve also been told that my blog is depressing and even I will admit that I rarely post when I am happy about something; this should be a welcome aberration from that norm.)

- Irrespective of how I may personally feel about the state of women’s education today, no one can deny the impressive strides that have been made in that arena. To a certain extent it may be unfair to complain that men’s education is better because it has been developing for that much longer. If anything, our education seems to be improving much more quickly than theirs is, so who knows how things will turn out.

- On that note, I think that I should take the opportunity to once again to thank all those men and women who have dedicated themselves to that cause. A special thank you goes to those who have really dedicated themselves to educating women as opposed to teaching men and making a hobby out of teaching a shiur or two in girls’ schools.

- The phenomenon that I was bemoaning also has a flip side: The goal of seminary, as I said is very different than that of yeshiva. As pretty much everyone yelled at me, that also has a positive side. Girls tend to emerge more well-rounded, with a much more holistic experience, etc. Furthermore, the development in my skill level between now and what it was at the beginning of shana aleph is immeasurable and on the one hand it means that I can’t stay shana gimmel (this is only an example!) because of that gap, but on the other hand, part of what allowed my skills to develop in that way is that the curriculum is so tailored to the age and skill level of incoming students.

- I also learned that just because I felt like the rebbeim in girls’ schools take the education less seriously, it is not necessarily so. I have been told that over and over AND OVER again. So, even though I may be frustrated about there not being a post-high school institution that means to turn its girls into talmidot chachamot, I’m going to have to leave the rabbis out of my bemoaning.

I believe that will be all on this subject for a very long time.