1) On question marks: The assertion that you said was "just your sense of it" was the following, directly quoted from your post for the second time: "yes, the state of Jewish education correlates negatively to income and education--just my sense of it." I found it inconsistent that you were objecting to Seraph's assertions (which I don't agree with either) with the incredulous-sounding "Are you sure about your figures?" and then immediately thereafter making an assertion (one without a question mark) that you excuse from providing any facts to back up at all. I see now that it's not inconsistent: you seem to be consistently prioritizing personal experience over facts and statistics, which is a perfectly valid position. Particularly in an instance when, as you say, the statistics aren't sourced and seem both off the cuff and incredible.

2) You misread me in my first post, I suppose. I said nothing about Jewish education. Jewish kids grow up to leave Judaism for the same reasons Christian kids grow up to leave Christianity, Buddhist kids grow up to leave Buddhism, and atheist kids grow up to join a religion: What worked for their parents isn't working for them, and the emphasis, society-wide, is on finding something new rather than making do with what you've got when something isn't working.

3) I'm not criticizing you for drawing implications, nor did I think you were arguing for less secular schooling. I believed, on the grounds of your post, that you were advancing the argument that there was a correlation between less secular schooling and better religious schooling, or vice versa.  You said:

"the state of Jewish education correlates negatively to income and
education--just my sense of it.  That is, the more of the latter the
poorer quality of the former."

I understood this to mean: more secular education means less religious education. 

"We may have nice incomes and degrees, but educationally, we're in the slums."

Based on my reading of the preceding quotes, I understood this to mean that while we have sufficient secular education to get us nice jobs, our religious education is in a sad state.

This interpretation, I felt, was supported by:

"I suspect that if there were no curriculum on the Holocaust,
intellectually and spiritually (italics mine) we'd be wandering the woods bumping into
trees."

We seem to chronically misread each other, and it's not something I want to drag other Jewcers through on a regular basis. Moreover, there's no major disagreements between us that should make it this hard for us to communicate. I certainly don't want you to feel that I'm attacking you every time I question something you write or try to explore another facet of it (as I did with the third and fourth paragraph of my second post). Nor do I want you to feel compelled to resort to such digs as writing "(question mark)" before every "?". Let's work something out so we don't go around like this anymore. And let's take that either to PMs or to my user blog so as not to clog up this thread anymore. (PMs are fine with me or if you want the conversation to be public, let me know and I'll start a thread in my user blog to discuss this in the comments.)