One of the dumber ideas I've heard in a long time is the following:
"If your ideas about _______ are the right ideas, they will prevail in the free market of ideas."
Whatever the merits of the theory, history and experience have shown this to be patently false. It sounds catchy, but is an outright lie.
The Beis Medrash of old, and its devotion to unstructured learning, was fine when the Beis Medrash/Yeshiva system catered to the elite of Jewish Europe. That has absolutely NOTHING to do with today's Yeshiva system, which is meant to cater to all Orthodox youth.
Any attempt to compare the curricula, syllabi or teaching methods of the classical yeshiva of over 70 years ago to a yeshiva of today, or to base the latter on the former, is therefore inherently ridiculous and criminal from a chinuch standpoint. It is akin (l'havdil) to comparing an Ivy League University Advanced English Literature course of 200 years ago to a lower-level 10th grade English class in a low-level inner-city public High School.
How to write?
I have had a yearning to write for a long time. My blog is an outgrowth of that desire. But it clearly requires a patience and perseverance that I often lack. First of all, I find it easier to write longhand. But that is for the dinosaurs. (Please don't put me in cheirem! I mean the dinosaurs that were wiped away in the flood less than 5000 years ago!) I get the feeling that anything committed to paper will be lost to the future.
Then again, the way computers crash nowadays, real ink on paper might last longer. In thirty years, when our current computers will possess the dazzle of today's Commodore 64, and people are reading information off some newer high-tech acronym, the disk with the information I put on a .doc file today might be an undecipherable piece of plastic.
Technology is just an excuse though. If I want to write, I'll WRITE. I do wish that the yeshiva had encouraged writing along with the hours upon hours of reading we were encouraged to do.
Are there any writers out there? If anyone has tips on writing, please comment, send an e-mail or IM me.