Thread by @bansisharma

The Miseducation of America's Elites

A must read article from one of my most favorite columnists (who quit New York Times for being suffocated there) -- Bari Weiss (@bariweiss).
bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-miseduca…

"So it [is] more than ironic that a school that costs more than $40,000 a year — a school with Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right hand, and Sarah Murdoch, wife of Lachlan and Rupert’s daughter-in-law, on its board — is teaching students that capitalism is evil."

The demonization of capitalism is the least of it. The children are afraid to speak up in class. They worry that the school’s new plan to become an “anti-racist institution” is making their kids fixate on race and attach importance to it in ways that strike them as grotesque.

A father says he doesn’t have a problem with the school making greater efforts to redress past wrongs and bringing more minority voices into the curriculum. His problem is with a movement that tells his children that America is bad and that they bear collective racial guilt.

One private school parent, born in a Communist nation, tells me: “I came to this country escaping the very same fear of retaliation that now my own child feels.” Another joked: “We need to feed our families. Oh, and pay $50,000 a year to have our children get indoctrinated.”

The atmosphere is making their children anxious, paranoid, and insecure. “My son knew I was talking to you and he begged me not to. He wants to go to a great university, and he told me that one bad statement from me will ruin us. This is America. Are you freaking kidding me?”

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,” which discourages people from using the word “parents” — “folks” is preferred.

A 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. Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and an act of political warfare.”

“I am in a cult. Well, that’s not exactly right. It’s that the cult is all around me and I am trying to save kids from becoming members.” He sounds like a Scientology defector, but he is a math teacher at one of the most elite high schools in New York City.

This teacher is talking because he is alarmed by the toll this ideology is taking on his students. “I started seeing what was happening to the kids. And that’s what I couldn’t take. They are being educated in resentment and fear. It’s extremely dangerous.”

“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.”

“They replaced all the books with no input or even informing the parents.” The curriculum no longer features The Scarlet Letter, Little Women, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Lord of the Flies. New books include: Stamped, Dear Martin, and Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass.

The events of last summer created a call to action for all of us, in our school community and beyond.” Brentwood has announced a late-starting school day on March 10 for the lower school “due to our faculty book study of White Fragility.”

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.

Harvard-Westlake, in its extensive antiracist plan announced this summer, included “redesigning the 11th grade US History course from a critical race theory perspective,” among many similar goals.

All this is now blessed by the Biden administration.