Bari Weiss has a tremendous essay by on the state of affairs in elite secondary schools, but including the first inklings of secret resistance. Coverage below.
The New York Times allows Brett Stephens to be critical of California's Ethnic Studies Follies. A short excerpt below. Others have slammed the curriculum more effectively, but the source makes this notable.
A group of courageous University of Chicago students sets up "The Chicago Thinker" a well-produced news website devoted to "defend conservative and libertarian perspectives in a community that is increasingly intolerant of such voices."
The Academic Freedom Alliance is launched, not just to talk and expose censorship but also to offer concrete and even legal help to those targeted. Spend some time browsing the website. We need not just voices, but institutions of civil society to defend free speech and thought, and this is a great initiative. It adds to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the Heterodox Academy
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Bari Weiss (I have reordered many paragraphs by my topics) What's it like at fancy schools these days?
A Harvard-Westlake English teacher welcomes students back after summer with: “I am a queer white womxn of European descent. I use [ she | her ] pronouns but also feel comfortable using [ they | them ] pronouns.” She attached a “self-care letter” quoting Audre Lorde: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
“We don’t call them Newton’s laws anymore,” an upperclassman at the school informs me. “We call them the three fundamental laws of physics. They say we need to ‘decenter whiteness,’ and we need to acknowledge that there’s more than just Newton in physics.”
One of her classmates says that he tries to take “the fact classes, not the identity classes.” But it’s gotten harder to distinguish between the two. “I took U.S. history and I figured when you learn about U.S. history maybe you structure it by time period or what happened under each presidency. We traced different marginalized groups. That was how it was structured. I only heard a handful of the presidents’ names in class.
Way back in the 1970s I chose MIT and majored physics in part because I understood that in the humanities and social sciences I would be graded mostly on my willingness to spit back professors' political opinions. As a developing libertarian grappling with important issues, I could not stay quiet. I left. Plus ça change, but it has changé a lot for the worse. There is no hiding in physics anymore either, apparently.
“They replaced all the books with no input or even informing the parents.” The curriculum no longer features classics such as The Scarlet Letter, Little Women, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Lord of the Flies. New books include: Stamped, Dear Martin, Dear Justice, and Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass.
At Grace Church School, seniors can take a course called “Allying: Why? Who? and How?” The curriculum includes a ’zine called “Accomplices Not Allies” that declares “the work of an accomplice in anti-colonial struggle is to attack colonial structures & ideas,” alongside a photograph of a burning police car. ..
One teacher told me that he was asked to teach an antiracist curriculum that included a “pyramid” of white supremacy. At the top was genocide. At the bottom was “two sides to every story.”
Indoctrination extends so sadly to lower grades. Bari captures well the voices of very young children:“‘Two sides to every story,’” he said. “That was on the racist pyramid.”
Consider this story, from Chapin, the tony all-girls school on the Upper East Side, involving a white girl in the lower grades who came home one day and told her father: “All people with lighter skin don’t like people with darker skin and are mean to them.” He was horrified as she explained that that was what she had been taught by her teachers. “I said to her: that’s not how we feel in this family.”
Let's hope he added "shh, don't tell your teachers I told you that." Later,
the mother to a four-year-old...was drawing with her daughter, who said offhandedly: “I need to draw in my own skin color.” Skin color, she told her mother, is “really important.” She said that’s what she learned in school.
My emphasis.
The most interesting part of Bari's essay though is the realization of just what this is: A complex marker of privilege, to gain access to an increasingly credentialized and stratified society.
Power in America now comes from speaking woke, a highly complex and ever-evolving language. The Grace Church School in Manhattan, for example, offers a 12-page guide to “inclusive language,”
The guide is worth reading. I thought of doing a joke version of such a guide. I don't need to. Reality is better than farce.
Fluency in woke is an effective class marker and key for these princelings to retain status in university and beyond. The parents know this, and so woke is now the lingua franca of the nation’s best prep schools. As one mother in Los Angeles puts it: “This is what all the colleges are doing, so we have to do it.
Woe betide the working-class kid who arrives in college and uses Latino instead of “Latinx,” or who stumbles conjugating verbs because a classmate prefers to use the pronouns they/them.
Woe betide the immigrant who gets "of color" and "people" in the wrong order.
This is not about actually helping disadvantaged people. This is a new race for status -- like $500 torn jeans and designer Che Guevara t-shirts. Membership in the upper class has always come with status markers of language, clothes and behavior. The Queen's accent. Knowing which fork to pick up. Knowing Latin or Greek. Today,
...children learn how the new rules of woke work. The idea of lying in order to please a teacher seems like a phenomenon from the Soviet Union. But the high schoolers I spoke with said that they do versions of this, including parroting views they don’t believe in assignments so that their grades don’t suffer.
If they want good grades in college, and good jobs in our tech companies, that might be a very good idea. The hilarious hypocrisy of course is that access to an increasingly controlled upper stratum of society depends on mastering a vocabulary of nonsense words that pretends to care about the disadvantaged. Well, sort of like getting ahead in the Soviet Union depended on pretending to care about "workers" and mastering "marxist-lenisist thought."
The cynical answer for their silence is two words: Ivy League. “There are definitively rumors that the school has like, say, three picks for Duke and that if you stand up against this your kid will get blackballed,” says one mother.
Bain & Company is tweeting about “Womxn’s History Month.” The Cartoon Network is imploring children to “see color.” Coca-Cola employees were recently instructed to “be less white.” You cannot buy or sell the newly problematic Dr. Seuss titles on eBay.
Most succinctly,
This ideology isn’t speaking truth to power. It is the power.
My emphasis.
But Bari starts with a little good news. There is an underground resistance:
Harvard-Westlake parents’ group is one of many organizing quietly around the country to fight what it describes as an ideological movement that has taken over their schools.
Underground, though, because we all know the power of the mob:
They worry about losing their jobs or hurting their children if their opposition to this ideology were known.
“The school can ask you to leave for any reason,” said one mother at Brentwood, another Los Angeles prep school. “Then you’ll be blacklisted from all the private schools and you’ll be known as a racist, which is worse than being called a murderer.”
That fear is shared, deeply, by the children. For them, it’s not just the fear of getting a bad grade or getting turned down for a college recommendation, though that fear is potent. It’s the fear of social shaming. “If you publish my name, it would ruin my life. People would attack me for even questioning this ideology. I don’t even want people knowing I’m a capitalist,” a student at the Fieldston School in New York City told me,...
Fancy prep schools are just the vanguard. Back in the public schools,
Most alarmingly, the ideology is increasingly prevalent at the local public school. The incoming New York City schools chancellor is a vocal proponent of critical race theory. In Burbank, the school district just told middle- and high school teachers to stop teaching To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men. The Sacramento school district is promoting racial segregation by way of “racial affinity groups,” where students can “cultivate racial solidarity and compassion and support each other in sitting with the discomfort, confusion, and numbness that often accompany white racial awakening.” The San Diego school district recently held a training
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Brett Stephens updates us on California public schools:
From the opening pages of the model curriculum, students are expected not just to “challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs,” but to “critique empire-building in history” and “connect ourselves to past and contemporary social movements that struggle for social justice.”
Irish-Americans have faced a long history of discrimination in the U.S. and are famously proud of their heritage. But the word “Irish” hardly appears anywhere in the model curriculum, and nowhere in its sample lessons. Russians, Italians, Poles and others rate only the briefest mentions.
Perhaps this is because all of them, like most Jews, have a new identity, known in the jargon of ethnic studies as “conditional whiteness,” which simultaneously erases their past and racializes their present. Leave aside the ignorance this fosters regarding the long history of differences, struggles and achievements by various European ethnic groups in America. It’s also the mirror image of longstanding prejudices regarding “Asians” or “Hispanics” as ethnically undifferentiated masses of mainly identical people.
... To treat “whiteness” — conditional or otherwise — not as an accident of pigmentation but as an ethnicity unto itself is what the David Dukes of the world have always wanted.
The Chicago Thinker, AFA, FIRE and Heterodox Academy will have plenty to do.
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