The article argues that many Orthodox parents create a damaging split between home and school by living modern lives while sending children to institutions that deny that reality. According to the writer, parents often hide smartphones before meeting school leaders and ask children not to mention them, which teaches children to live with two different public and private identities.
He says children cannot comfortably accept contradictions between what they learn at home and what they are told in school. If a school presents the family’s way of life as wrong, the child may be forced to choose between parents and institution, risking either a loss of trust in the parents or contempt for the school. He warns that when parents cooperate with this deception, children learn that respectable people can maintain lies for social reasons.
The article gives a specific example of a respected yeshiva head who claimed there were no problematic phones there and that students had no “evil inclination” for them. A quick check with several students, the writer says, showed that many had unkosher phones, some even inside the yeshiva. He argues that this secrecy is more dangerous than open discussion, because students then find technology on their own without guidance or boundaries.
He also says the deeper problem is not the phones themselves but the institutional narrative that they do not exist, which prevents honest conversation by staff and parents alike. The article closes by warning about rising radicalization among some young Haredim, citing violent incidents such as lying under a bus, pushing an elderly Jew, entering a police station, or blocking a family on the way to a wedding. The writer urges parents to ask whether they live peacefully with their own path, saying a child who sees a parent living honestly receives a model of truth, and “without truth there is no education that lasts.”
