[Avodah] Teaching Children About Things That Are Not Specifically Jewish

[Professor L. Levine via Avodah]

In some Orthodox circles the secular is denigrated as a matter of course.  RSRH says that this approach is dangerous.  The following is from his essay


 Chanoch L'na'ar Al Pi Darko <https://web.stevens.edu/golem/llevine/rsrh/chanoch_l_naar_al_pi_darco.pdf>  (Collected Writings VII)


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 she'nasan

meichochmaso l'basor va'dom that it
is God 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 simpleminded
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.

Things would have turned out differently if you had educated and
raised your child al pi darko;  if you had educated him to be a Jew, and
to love and observe his Judaism together with the clear light of general
human culture and knowledge;  if, from the very beginning, you would
have taught him to study, to love, to value and to revere Judaism,
undiluted and unabridged, and Jewish wisdom and scholarship, likewise
unadulterated, in its relation to the totality of secular human wisdom
and scholarship. Your child would have become a different person
if you had taught him to discern the true value of secular wisdom
and scholarship by measuring it against the standard of the Divinely given
truths of Judaism; if, in making this comparison, you would

have noted the fact that is obvious even to the dullest eye, namely, that
the knowledge offered by Judaism is the original source of all that is
genuinely true, good and pure in secular wisdom, and that secular

learning is merely a preliminary, a road leading to the ultimate, more
widespread dissemination of the truths of Judaism. If you had opened
your child's eyes to genuine, thorough knowledge in both fields of
study, then you would have taught him to love and cherish Judaism
and Jewish knowledge all the more.


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