oints of view >> Send letters to: letters@thejewishnews.com Guest Column Editorial Sustaining A Day School Education -Financially As Well As Morally Boston/JTA T here is a lot of hand wringing these days about whether the rising costs of Jewish day schools are sustainable. The discussion focuses on money, but this misses the point: The largest costs of day school tuition are not financial but moral, and the key to solving the financial dilemma is to address the moral problem. What are the moral costs? Imagine that someone proposes a new Jewish practice that would have these outcomes: • Parents take second jobs, or work longer hours, that deprive them of almost all weekday contact with their children and leave them too exhausted to make Shabbat meaningful. • Nearly half of households are transformed for years from community contributors to char- ity recipients. • Children aspiring to intellectual, creative or service work, such as teaching (especially Torah) or other helping professions, are told that these are not options because they will not produce enough money to sustain a committed Jewish life- style. • Families choose to have fewer children for purely economic reasons. We would consider such a practice stunningly irresponsible. Yet these are real-life consequences of cur- rent day school tuition, even as day school education is increasingly seen as vital in successful Jewish child rearing. Should we therefore undo commit- ment to broad-based day school education? No. We can address the moral issues and, in doing so, the financial ones as well. Many of the moral challenges come not from the amount that families must pay, but from the system that determines the amount. Under the current financial aid system, families have no guarantee of how they will be affected by tuition hikes or whether the school will take account of a job loss or extra income from a second job. Unable to plan and chronically dependent on the decisions of others, they are deprived of economic dignity. Furthermore, financial aid applications require families to state their expenses in often humiliating detail, so that an anonymous corn- mittee can sit in judgment of their priorities. A family that eats pasta all month so it can go to a movie risks an aid cut because it spends on entertainment. 32 June 7 * 2012 Should we therefore undo commitment to broad-based day school education? No. We can address the moral issues and, in doing so, the financial ones as well. Moving Beyond Yes, the price of poverty is often loss of privacy and dignity. But these are evils; they must be minimized. The current system maximizes these evils by forcing otherwise self-support- ing, even wealthy families to apply for charity because "full tuition" is unaffordable even for many households earning more than $200,000 per year. A model like that of the Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Boston offers great potential. Put simply, here's how it might work: Basic tuition is a fixed percentage of gross income set at approximately the percentage that the current financial aid process tends to charge middle-income families. High- income families can choose to pay a fixed amount, approximately what is now called "full tuition:' in order to lower their tuition. Families unable to pay the fixed per- centage could, as now, apply for financial aid. This model corrects many of the current sys- tem's moral deficiencies: • It makes the tuition-setting process trans- parent and predictable for many more families. • It moves many middle-class families off the charity rolls and minimizes the schools' intru- sion into their affairs. • It defines day school education as a public good to be communally supported instead of an individual good privately purchased. • It makes clear that the rich, even when they pay the maximum tuition, are assessed a lower percentage of their income than the middle class. Day Schools on page 33 The Internet - Step Back To Help Move It Forward I s the digital age corrupting kids to where we must shield them from the ever-growing Internet? The question is spur- ring debate on the Jewish front. New York's haredi Orthodox community has brought the issue to light as a crucible for Judaism's direction. The issue is worth exploring. Solving the puzzle of the Internet's potency for moral cor- ruption lies in grasping more than just temporary usage of limiting software. It requires parents and educators teaching not only the technology of the Internet, but also its power. We then would have the inside track toward inspiring "our children to become their own filters when exploring the Internet," as a Yeshiva University (YU) essay cogently put it. The premise of the essay, by Dr. Eliezer Jones and Dr. David Pelcovitz of the New York-based university, is that "it seems that children will listen to our rules, at least when it comes to the Internet." That's a shaky baseline, but it probably is true that children whose parents set limits on using computers, watching TV and playing video games do spend less time mind- lessly roaming cyberspace and the airwaves than peers who have unlimited rein (and on average devote more than three hours a day to such e-draws). Peer pressure is to be reckoned with, but kids are more apt to take heed when adults they respect confront the sharpest edges of Internet content. On May 20, 40,000 haredi men flocked to Citi Field in Queens to hear haredi leaders blast the Internet as a minefield of immorality — something to avoid at home and use sparingly at work. Impractical and extreme as that notion is, and it hardly should be the top haredi priority, it does train the national spot- light on the sweep of the World Wide Web. Rabbi Ephraim Wachsman, one of the speakers, described the Internet as impure and a threat to modesty. But let's be blunt: E-competence, and the knowledge land- scape that it affords, is critical to each student's future success in class, in business and in society. YU cites a Pew Foundation study that found 54 percent of children say they go to Google first when they have a question as opposed to 26 percent who go to a parent and 3 percent who go to a teacher. The Web is here to stay. Yes, it can skew ideas. Yes, it must be improved — high as that hurdle is. So responsible adults must up the ante in sharing principles for e-guidelines and e-monitoring. Haredim believe Jewish law forbids Jews from browsing the Internet without a filter. But the YU essay put that in perspec- tive: "Powerful filters can block illicit images and material, but those filters often block out the good with the bad and limit far too much useful information." Still, the Internet's force field has forced overindulgent kids to enjoy less interaction with others and thus less experience with how to get along and adjust. The problem, of course, is that parents too often are slaves to their Blackberrys, iPhones, iPads and PCs. The Jewish world would do well to try to harness the Internet, enriching its bounty, exposing its corrosiveness and extending its possibilities. To dismiss it as a blatant danger to traditional Jewish life, however, is absurd.