Growth Is Messy: And Good Education (and educators) Know That

Let me start with the punchline… Please stay in your lane. Not only because it’s annoying when you don’t, but because it does a real disservice to the next generation of religious adolescents. I am constantly inundated with language describing the expectations of a “frum eighteen-year-old.” It has to stop and it has to stop now. This is done constantly in education. The constant statements: “This is what a good high school student is supposed to look like”, “This is how a seminary girl is supposed to behave” “This is what a religious young woman should know by now”, “This is what she should post”…what she should wear, say, understand, and believe and then we are frustrated when young adults turn out to be exactly what they are: young adults and not finished products! Guess what, that distinction matters.

I have spent much of my professional life working with adolescents, and my doctoral research focused specifically on adolescent religious development. One of the most consistent mistakes adults make is expecting developmental outcomes before the developmental process has occurred. We look at an eighteen-year-old and see an adult body, adult vocabulary, sophisticated opinions, and what appears to be enormous confidence (even if that is really covering up tremendous lack of self-esteem) and we quietly assume that we are dealing with a fully formed adult. Let me clear, we most definitely are not. We are dealing with someone in the middle of becoming. That is not an excuse for poor behavior, rather it is the starting point of good education!

There is a developmental trajectory. There is an adolescent milieu. There is an entire world of competing values, social pressures, cultural messages, family expectations, technology, friendships, independence, insecurity, religious aspiration, and spiritual questioning that these young women carry with them when they arrive in Israel. They do not leave all of that at Ben Gurion Airport. And somehow, they are expected to.

Every year there seems to be some new panic. A few seminary girls make a TikTok. Someone sends it around. It gets forwarded again. Suddenly adults are analyzing it, discussing what it “means,” worrying about what it says about the girls, their schools, Modern Orthodoxy, the next generation of the Jewish people.

Relax!! Geez, someone made a TikTok. That does not mean educators ignore behavior. It means serious educators understand behavior before reacting to it. There is a transition that must take place when a student enters a new environment. I call it a detox. Not because everything she comes with is bad, but because she has spent eighteen years becoming accustomed to a particular culture, social language, technology, peer group, family structure, and way of navigating the world. You cannot change the scenery on Monday and expect a completely transformed human being by Tuesday morning. Growth needs some oxygen. Good education and good educators don’t panic at the first sign of humanity.

Unfortunately, parts of the educational world have become extraordinarily reactive. People become trigger-happy with consequences because they are terrified that someone may see an imperfection. We worry about appearances, what parents will say. We worry about what another school will say and we worry about what a picture, video, or rumor might suggest.

Sometimes people become so busy protecting the image of the institution that they forget that the institution exists to educate the student. This is precisely one of the major underpinnings of what we are building at Midreshet Ora. We are trying to so something different. We are not interested in educational theater. We are interested in chinuch. That means doing our due diligence. It means asking questions. It means understanding context. It means resisting the temptation to get swept into adolescent drama by becoming adolescents ourselves. It means knowing the difference between a mistake, a pattern, a developmental issue, a values issue, and something that genuinely requires immediate intervention. Anyone can react but educators are supposed to know how to respond.

Every student who walks into Ora, like any other seminary, brings a context with her. She brings eighteen years of family life, schooling, friendships, community culture, religious messaging, successes, contradictions, assumptions, strengths, and unfinished questions. Fifty-six completely different developmental stories suddenly walk through the same doors and begin living and learning together. Of course there are going to be bumps. The sophistication of a school is not measured by whether those bumps occur. It is measured by what the school does when they do.

There is another piece that is even more important. One of the central developmental tasks of late adolescence and emerging adulthood is identity formation. Religious identity is part of that process. This is a time when our young people’s identity is supposed to be under construction

At some point, a young person must begin answering questions that were previously answered for her. What do I believe? Why do I do this? What role does Torah play in my life? Which values that I inherited have genuinely become mine? What happens when my emerging beliefs do not perfectly mirror those of my parents, my high school, my community, or the culture around me? Those are not dangerous questions; they are very adult questions. The problem is if we do not give young people the room to ask them responsibly, they do not magically disappear. They simply get pushed underground.

The literature on human development has been trying to explain this process for generations. Piaget examined cognitive development. Kohlberg explored moral development. Erikson focused heavily on identity and psychosocial development. James Fowler later brought many of these developmental ideas into his understanding of faith development and described what he called individuative-reflective faith: the movement toward examining, owning, and taking responsibility for beliefs that may previously have been inherited largely from family or community.

This stage of individuative-reflective faith matters greatly to me. At some point, religion has to move from “this is what they taught me” to “this is how I have learned to understand and live it.” That transition does not happen instantly. It requires reflection, experience and knowing how to make decisions. Sometimes it even means getting things wrong. It certainly requires adults who are secure enough in their own beliefs not to become frightened every time a young person asks a difficult question or acts in a way that is different than what the expectation should be. My gosh, why is self-expression and healthy adolescent rebellion being prevented as opposed to respected and used as an opportunity for discussion and growth!

We often say that we want students to develop a mature relationship with Judaism. But maturity cannot be downloaded. It must be developed and development takes time.

This is where I think people sometimes do genuine damage. We place enormous pressure on young people to perform at a level of religious certainty, behavioral consistency, judgment, and maturity that they have not yet had enough time to internalize. Then, because the external behavior may look good for a while, we assume the job has been accomplished and it has not.

Compliance is not the same thing as conviction and conformity is not the same thing as identity. If there is no underpinning, if a young person does not understand what he or she believes and why they live the way they do, then when the external structure disappears, there may be very little holding the structure up. This is where those who do not understand adolescence gasp in shock. They say things like “She was doing so well” or “He was so Shtark”… Maybe they became very good at functioning inside a system without ever having enough room to build one inside themselves. That is precisely why we must play the long game!

One of the things we are very intentional about at Midreshet Ora, is that we are not trying to produce the most impressive version of an eighteen-year-old by Chanukah. We are trying to educate the twenty-five-year-old, the thirty-five-year-old, the future wife, mother, professional, community member, thinker, learner, and Jewish leader who is still becoming. That changes how one educates and I am really proud of this piece. We do not confuse standards with panic, we don’t confuse a mistake with an identity, and we certainly do not confuse an unfinished eighteen-year-old with a failed one!

If you expect perfection prior to perfection being developmentally possible, you do not create perfect young adults, you create young adults who become very good at hiding. Hiding is not Chinuch. Which is why our goal is something much more ambitious. We want our students to understand themselves well enough, understand Torah deeply enough, and understand the world honestly enough that when nobody from Midreshet Ora is standing next to them anymore, they can make thoughtful, serious Jewish choices because those choices have become theirs.

I want to say something else that I think people who either don’t understand or live in this world of education get confused about. None of this should be misconstrued as lowering expectations. In fact, it is quite the opposite. The bar should be set high. Our young men and women should be challenged. They should be expected to grow, to take responsibility, to make increasingly mature choices, to live lives of substance, and to aspire toward something far greater than mediocrity. I personally have no interest in educational systems that congratulate young people simply for showing up. It is essential to understand that setting a high bar and understanding development are not contradictions. The job of the educator is not merely to point at the bar. It is to know how to help a student reach it.

Adults often forget how far they have traveled. We judge an eighteen-year-old from the vantage point of forty, fifty, or sixty years of living. We have already had experiences that clarified our priorities. We have made mistakes, encountered consequences, built relationships, raised families, struggled with faith, experienced loss, learned judgment, and hopefully developed some perspective. Then we look backward and become irritated that an eighteen-year-old does not yet possess what took us decades to develop. That is simply not fair!  A healthy developmental trajectory has a curve. Our sensitivities as adults may sometimes make that curve uncomfortable to watch. Fine. Education is not supposed to exist for the comfort of the adults. Our responsibility is to recognize where a student actually is, respect the process without romanticizing it, and then give her the Torah, knowledge and confidence necessary to keep climbing. But understanding where someone stands is not the same as accepting that she should remain there. I think that is often the distinction we are missing. Grace without expectations becomes mediocrity and expectations without developmental understanding become crushing, but great Chinuch demands both!

There is also an irony here that I am going to call out, and I hope people are willing to confront. Good educators spend enormous amounts of time telling teenagers not to judge people. Then adults see thirty seconds of someone’s life on social media and construct an entire character assessment. A clip circulates; a story gets repeated or someone heard something from someone who knows someone. Within hours, people are making pronouncements about a student, a family, an educator, or an institution. That is the highest level of irresponsibility. It is particularly troubling when people with platforms speak with enormous confidence about areas in which they have very little professional knowledge. A platform does not translate into having credentials and visibility is not expertise and guess what, confidence does not mean competence. Stay in your lane!

I would never stand up and teach a course on fluid dynamics because I have no training in fluid dynamics and there is no shame in that. There are countless things I don’t know. But somehow, when the topic is adolescent development, adolescent psychology, religious development, education, or human behavior, everybody suddenly becomes an expert, and most aren’t.  Here is the takeaway, words have consequences, character assassinations have consequences, casual comments about schools have consequences, pronouncements about young people have consequences. The most responsible thing a person can say is, “I don’t know enough about this situation to have an opinion.”

What we are trying to create at Midreshet Ora is, in some ways, extraordinarily simple. We believe in our students enough not to be afraid of their unfinished parts. We expect them to grow because we know they are capable of growth and we give them standards because standards matter. We challenge them because we believe they can rise and we give them guidance because they are still learning. They have room to grow because growth cannot happen without room. Most importantly, we do not mistake one moment in a young woman’s development for the final verdict on who she is going to become.

It’s easy to demand that a student look right but it is much harder to help her become right. It’s also easy to enforce behavior while you are standing in the room. It’s much harder to educate someone so deeply that the values remain when you are no longer there. If your definition of a great school is one in which every student looks perfect in September, you do not really need educators. You need an admissions director who is exceptionally good at selecting finished products. Great schools do something harder! They set the bar high and then have the patience, expertise, and confidence to walk alongside young people as they learn how to reach it. That is what we are building at Midreshet Ora. We are not frightened by the process of becoming. We built the school for it.