In the past few weeks, it has become apparent that the extreme progressive impulses infecting higher education in the United States have moved from campus quads and dormitories into our nation’s middle and high schools, and even kindergartens. In New York City alone, the Dalton School uptown has seen an uprising and departure of numerous high-level staff over questions of curriculum and social justice. Downtown, a Grace Church School teacher published an open letter explaining the school’s new “anti-racist” ideology which induces shame in white students for being oppressors; he has witnessed the harmful impact these ideas have had on children including silencing inquiry, a core role of a school, such that “children are afraid to challenge the repressive ideology that rules our school.”
Most recently, a Brearley School parent penned an open letter to the entire community of parents explaining he was pulling his daughter from the school because of its “obsession with race” and the fact that the school abandoned its principle of teaching how to think for teaching what to think. In response, the Brearley doubled-down on its position and argued that this letter was both offensive and harmful; it was nothing of the sort.
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