In this week’s reading we find the declaration, Shema Yisrael, “Hear oh Israel” [Deut. 6:4-9], which is part of our prayers morning and evening. And in that paragraph we find the admonition, regarding the Torah and its teachings, “And you shall teach them to your children” [6:7].

This Mitzvah places the responsibility upon parents to ensure that their children are educated in Torah. Parents routinely hire others to participate in educating their children, “outsourcing” this task to schools, but the Torah emphasizes that this is a parent’s obligation, with the teachers and schools serving merely as hired help. And a critical part of this Commandment is that Torah education is not simply about facts, knowledge, and study techniques, but also ethics and moral behavior.

This has become a debated point over the past few generations, as public schooling (funded through taxation, rather than by individual parents) has made education a communal, rather than individual, obligation. Public schooling regards itself as “values neutral,” meaning that it (supposedly) refuses to step into religious or ethical teachings which might contradict what parents teach at home. Yet all of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Martin Luther King Jr. thought that teaching morals and character are key elements of education itself.

This means that even by the standards of American “secular” leaders, there is an obvious void that is not filled by public schooling. By taking over the obligation of education from parents, and then not teaching values or character, public schools actually do many children a disservice.

Parents must understand that they are the ones responsible to fill in this gap. Obviously, the best way to do this is to send children to a Jewish school in which they are taught the “whole package” by Torah standards. But in any case, they must ensure that their children are knowledgeable not only in reading, writing, and arithmetics, but also in the Torah’s moral and ethical principles that teach children to make a positive contribution to society around them, and to transmit the Torah to their own children after them.