A number of educators put a number of practical questions about teaching to Rav Yaakov Kaminetzky. To cite just two examples: whether and how to teach a) evolution, and b) the history of the Roman Catholic Church and Greek mythology.
Reb Yaakov answered each of these questions with specific suggestions and advice (e. g., evolution should be taught by the menahel or some other knowledgeable Torah personality, not the regular science teacher. History of the Church was to be taught, including its role in atrocities against the Jewish people and its other excesses against reason, morality and ethics. Greek mythology should be taught to demonstrate the ridiculously foolish beliefs held by these properly extinct cultures. Pages in books should not be skipped, pasted together, or blacked out, as this only increases students’ curiosity about the subject).
He then turned to us and said, in Yiddish, as follows: I’ll tell you. I’m often asked here in Monsey and especially regarding girls, “How much should we or can we shut them off to protect them from the culture at large?” I always tell them, “You can’t! Unless, that is, you live in Squaretown.” Now especially; I understand they have their own hospital and their own cemetery, one can be born there, live ones life there, and be buried there. To those who can do that, ‘Tavo aleihem brachah’ (may they be blessed). Most of us, however, do not live in Squaretown and cannot live in Squaretown. So what will you do? Not tell a young boy about evolution and then wait until at age 16 or 17 he reads in the New York Times, which he ‘knows’ prints only ‘verified facts,’ that the bones of a person 2 or 3 million years old were found!?? And the Times will print this without any mention of detracting opinions or controversy. What will this young man do? He’ll be completely lost! This would not happen if he had been taught at an earlier time in school by his rabbei’im and teachers that there are people who believe such and such, what their mistaken beliefs are based on, where their error is, what it is we believe about such events, and how we believers deal with these issues.
Reb Yaakov then continued, You know, when I was a boy growing up, I had a friend. He was always a little more than I was, and did more than I did. He was a year older: I was 10 and he was 11. He wore long payos, I didn’t. He wore a gartel, and I didn’t. Last summer when I was in Eretz Yisrael, I met him again. He was living in K’far Saba and I paid him a visit. While talking to him I found out that things had changed and that, unfortunately, he was now turning on the lights on Shabbos. He turned to me and he asked, ‘Yankel, what’s happened to us. “Ich bin doch altz geven frummer” (Wasn’t I always frumer than you??!!), to which I replied [and here Reb Yaakov smiled and there was a glint in his eyes], “Ye, ye du bist takke allz geven frummer, ich bin obber alz geven kluger.” “Yes, yes you were always frummer but I was always kluger (wiser).”
חנוך לנער על פי דרכו גם כי יזקין לא יסור ממנו. (Educate a child in accordance with his ways, even when he grows older he will not stray from it.), Rav Hirsch explains that when we educate a child we must choose an approach which takes into cognizance the “gam ki yazkin”; the life and the world the child will live in after he leaves our home and tutelage. We must prepare him for dealing with this larger world. Having made this point he continues:
Finally, it would be most perverse and criminal of us to seek to instill into our children a contempt, based on ignorance and untruth, for everything that is not specifically Jewish, for all other human arts and sciences, in the belief that by inculcating our children with such a negative attitude we could safeguard them from contacts with the scholarly and scientific endeavors of the rest of mankind. It is true, of course, that the results of secular research and study will not always coincide with the truths of Judaism, for the simple reason that they do not proceed from the axiomatic premises of Jewish truth. But the reality is that our children will move in circles influenced and shaped by these results. Your children will come within the radius of this secular human wisdom, whether it be in the lecture halls of academia or in the pages of literature. And if they discover that our own Sages, whose teachings embody the truth, have taught us מחכמתו שנתן ודם לבשר ,that it is G-d Who has given of His own wisdom to mortals, they will come to overrate secular studies in the same measure in which they have been taught to despise them. You will then see that your simple-minded calculations were just as criminal as they were perverse. Criminal, because they enlisted the help of untruth supposedly in order to protect the truth, and because you have thus departed from the path upon which your own Sages have preceded you and beckoned you to follow them. Perverse, because by so doing you have achieved precisely the opposite of what you wanted to accomplish. For now your child, suspecting you of either deceit or lamentable ignorance, will transfer the blame and the disgrace that should rightly be placed only upon you and your conduct to all the Jewish wisdom and knowledge, all the Jewish education and training which he received under your guidance. Your child will consequently begin to doubt all of Judaism which (so, at least, it must seem to him from your behavior) can exist only in the night and darkness of ignorance and which must close its eyes and the minds of its adherents to the light of all knowledge if it is not to perish.
From here.
