Satmar girls' school censorship and secular-education policy

Satmar girls' school censorship and secular-education policy confines secular learning to a brief daily period and filters even that instruction through school censorship. In the narrator’s account, English becomes a narrow opening: she excels at reading and longs to learn, while the curriculum, classroom expectations, and lack of recognized credentials mark out how little the school intends that learning to change her future.

A restricted place in the school day

The narrator describes English as a euphemism for the short interval each day in which the girls receive their government-mandated secular education. It comes after lunch in a bleak, windowless cafeteria and a climb up four flights of stairs. The arrangement places secular study inside the school day but gives it markedly less time and standing than the religious curriculum. The narrator says that she shines only in this period, even as the school’s schedule makes clear how limited its place is.

That hierarchy is reinforced by a contrast in discipline. The narrator recalls that misbehavior in English is not punished as severely as misbehavior during Yiddish period. The English teachers, too, occupy an uncertain position: they are described as educated beyond Satmar graduates, but their education and religious attitudes make them suspect in the eyes of their students. Calling them “modern girls” does not confer authority; it signals that they come from a less restrictive Hasidic environment that the Satmar girls do not regard as fully authentic. Secular learning is thus permitted, but neither its teachers nor its classroom are treated as equivalent to the religious core of schooling.

Censorship inside English class

The policy’s limits reach into the materials themselves. In one lesson, Miss Mandelbaum distributes a five-page short story with most of its contents blacked out by the school censor. The girls have little other reading practice: the weekly stories are often at a fourth-grade level, and the class struggles to read them aloud. The narrator, who loves reading, finishes the story in two minutes and then waits while her classmates work through it. A restricted supply of texts and modest reading expectations therefore shape not only what students may encounter but also the pace and level of their instruction.

The classroom scene exposes a gap between the narrator’s ability and the assumptions made about her. While Frimet stumbles over words, Miss Mandelbaum notices the narrator looking out the window and signals for her to follow along. The narrator indicates that she has already read the story; the teacher appears to think she is lying and assumes she cannot read. Only when Miss Mandelbaum asks Frimet to pause and calls on Devoiri does the narrator’s claim become testable. The episode shows how the school’s constrained reading environment can leave a capable student appearing disengaged, and how easily a teacher mistakes completion for pretense when she does not expect the girl to be ahead.

Restricted credentials and prescribed futures

The policy’s consequences extend beyond the classroom. In the narrator’s final year of high school, the girls graduate early because, as she puts it, there is no point in spending another year on an education they do not need. They receive no New York State diplomas. Instead, each gets a formal-looking piece of parchment signed by the principal and rabbi. The document records completion within the school, but it is not the state credential the narrator says she will not receive.

She connects that lack of recognition to the narrow employment prospects available to women in her society. In her assessment, she will never be allowed to work beyond a few positions, so a diploma would have little practical use. The school’s message is not simply that secular study must be limited; it is that further investment in education has no purpose. The early graduation, restricted credential, and limited prospects reinforce one another, presenting the girls’ education as preparation for a deliberately bounded future rather than an open-ended qualification.

Mrs. Berger and the contradiction of learning

In that last year, the students take English with Mrs. Berger, the school’s most educated teacher. She comes from Queens each day and has two master’s degrees, but the students know her as a grouch. Her opening remark—that none of them will write the next Great American Novel—lands on the narrator as a dismissal of the whole class. The narrator bristles at being grouped with students whose academic ambitions and reading skills she often finds limited; she wants her own capacity to be recognized rather than erased by an outsider’s judgment.

Mrs. Berger’s lessons also reveal the contradictory character of the school’s English instruction. She distributes a booklet copied from grammar books the girls are not allowed to have, with forbidden words removed. Her first rule excludes colloquialisms, idioms, and euphemisms. The narrator has never heard those terms before, yet their introduction is precisely what she has been waiting for: here, even a severe and disillusioned teacher can bring knowledge beyond the students’ usual curriculum. Mrs. Berger’s continued return each year, despite the students’ unreadiness and the limits on what they are taught, becomes significant to the narrator because it makes genuine instruction possible within those limits. The policy therefore produces more than a list of omissions: its censored stories, unavailable grammar books, and curtailed schooling define the boundary against which the narrator measures her appetite to read and learn.