‘Intimacy Ed’ In Chabad schools? Finally. Sort of.
Because pretending kids are innocent has clearly stopped working
Chabad finally woke up and realized that pretending thirteen year olds are newborn ducklings is not a chinuch strategy. So they rolled out “intimacy ed” for seventh and eighth graders, which is adorable, because they are only two years late. Give or take. I guess we should clap that someone in a chinuch office finally unclenched from a sefer long enough to notice what an iPhone is.
Do not get me wrong, the idea itself is correct and kids absolutely need this. The problem is that reality does not check in with a menahel before it shows up. Reality does not wait for a 30 week curriculum with a logo. Reality hits kids around fifth or sixth grade, and anyone who has ever taught in a real classroom already knows it.
Before anyone starts hyperventilating, let me clarify. I am not talking about the frum talent for turning eighth graders into miniature chosson teachers. I am talking about basic, functional guidance, so kids do not learn everything from the class clown who thinks Chrome Incognito Mode is the most fun thing since yeshiva week.
But no, we roll this out at seventh and eighth grade. Cute. Very cute. Their shock will be priceless when they discover that the boys who “need this most” already know more than the curriculum writers, and not from Rabbi Braun’s carefully curated source sheets.
Even if they picked the right ages, which they have not, the execution is still a giant question mark. What exactly are they planning to tell these kids. Anything real. Or just more “stay pure” speeches with a diagram taped to a table.
And of course you can already predict the future. Give the Litvish world fifteen to thirty years and they will start bragging that they invented the whole idea. Same story as kiruv. Chabad grinds for decades, someone else strolls in later and declares themselves the pioneers. Classic.
The COLlive article reads like a committee had a baby with a thesaurus. Endless paragraphs about how “the street has invaded our pockets.” Shocking revelation. Apparently smartphones have finally been discovered by the Merkos Chinuch Office. Mazal tov. Welcome to 2011.
They warn that boys are being exposed to “visual stimuli poisoning their minds.” Correct. This has been happening since before the first iPod Touch. Acting shocked about this now is like announcing that water is wet.
And then, of course, the classic frum paradox. “We never spoke about these things in public.” Yes, and that silence is exactly why the kids learned it all anyway from whatever site their friend’s Android was not filtered to block. Surprise, silence doesn’t produce purity. Ignorance created the disaster we are now frantically trying to fix.
The best comedy in the whole thing is that after all the speeches about tznius and privacy, they admit that those very values now require the opposite approach. Translation: The old method failed, not mildly, but spectacularly.
So after a year of talking, drafting, and scheduling meetings that could have powered a small city, we now have a pilot program for seventh and eighth graders. And in ten years they will quietly expand it to third through tenth grade, which means they know the truth right now but are too nervous to admit it publicly.
Look. I am glad they are doing something, but do not let the PR language fool you. This is the first baby step in catching up. But pretending that a few organized curriculums will somehow inoculate kids from a world that lives in their pocket is peak delusion.
But at least we are finally, finally, almost, kind of, slightly, moving toward sanity.
Which in frum education is practically a miracle.