(19) For I have known him, and he may command his children and his household after him, they may keep the way of the LORD, do righteousness and justice; to the end that the LORD may bring upon him that which He hath spoken of him.’
(13) And all thy children shall be taught of the LORD; and great shall be their peace.
Schools are the beating pulse of Jewish life. Other civilizations prided themselves on their castles and cathedrals. We cared less about buildings than about builders: Call them not (said the sages) ‘your children’ but ‘your builders’. Universal education – which Jews created eighteen centuries before Britain – was the first priority of any Jewish community. In the darkest days of persecution in Spain, Jews built schools. When the Thirty Years War that devastated Europe between 1618 and 1648 came to an end, the first thing Jews did was to reconstruct the educational system. When R. Samson Raphael Hirsch was appointed Rabbi in Frankfurt, his community wanted to build a new synagogue. First, he said, build a Jewish school. Only then may you build a synagogue.
Rabbi Lord Sacks
January 2011/Shevat 5771
A child's character education should take priority over his academic education. All educational efforts are basically meaningless unless built on the solid foundation of good character
-- The Lubavitcher Rebbe
To defend a country, you need an army. To defend civilization, you need education.
A focus on building schools has been there in every syllable of our history. While others built coliseums, we built schools.
If you want to save the Jewish future, you have to build Jewish day schools – there is no other way.
Rabbi Lord Sacks
…schools have not succeeded in the area of personality development, in training students to curb desires. It is only thanks to the influence of the home and religious instruction that this generation's youth have not completely cast off the constraints of civilization … where parental influence has not been weakened for whatever reason
…there exists no other way to implant in the hearts of children and youth a true and functional self-discipline except through the fear or love of a force greater than man… and this is something that cannot be postponed until the child reaches the age of 18, or even the age of 13, while allowing him until then to follow his heart's desires in the hope that he will reach a good and righteous path. One sees no other way than to instill in the hearts of the children, from their earliest years, a strong belief in Him Who created the world and continues to rule it and direct it. In the words of our sages, there is "an eye that sees, and ear that hears, and that all one's deeds are recorded in a book"2--a book that cannot be forged, an eye and an ear that cannot be bribed or outsmarted by any schemes or deceptions.
In Torah, belief in the Creator and Ruler of the world is binding upon all peoples ... any school, if its program includes "education"--moral as well as social--must set as one of its foundations the above belief, not only as a subject for theoretical study, but as something that concerns day-to-day life... if the school [even a non “religious” school] is completely devoid of religiosity, G‑d forbid, it lacks what, especially in our generation, is among the most primary functions of the school: to educate the student to be a human being worthy of his name--as distinguished from a mere animal.