Parents of Students at Elite Schools Fight Against Indoctrination of Their Children
“They say that their children tell them they’re afraid to speak up in class. Most of all, they worry that the school’s new plan to become an “anti-racist institution”—unveiled this July”
We recently pointed out that parents are rebelling at the exclusive Dalton School due to its full embrace of Critical Race Theory.
This is happening at other elite schools where parents realize that their kids are being indoctrinated, not educated.
Parents of students at Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, a private prep school with a $40,000 a year price tag, are forced to organize in secret for fear of being called racists.
Bari Weiss writes at City Journal:
The Miseducation of America’s Elites
The dissidents use pseudonyms and turn off their videos when they meet for clandestine Zoom calls. They are usually coordinating soccer practices and carpools, but now they come together to strategize. They say that they could face profound repercussions if anyone knew they were talking.
But the situation of late has become too egregious for emails or complaining on conference calls. So one recent weekend, on a leafy street in West Los Angeles, they gathered in person and invited me to join.
In a backyard behind a four-bedroom home, ten people sat in a circle of plastic Adirondack chairs, eating bags of Skinny Pop. These are the rebels: well-off Los Angeles parents who send their children to Harvard-Westlake, the most prestigious private school in the city.
By normal American standards, they are quite wealthy. By the standards of Harvard-Westlake, they are average. These are two-career couples who credit their own success not to family connections or inherited wealth but to their own education. So it strikes them as something 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.
For most parents, the demonization of capitalism is the least of it. They say that their children tell them they’re afraid to speak up in class. Most of all, they worry that the school’s new plan to become an “anti-racist institution”—unveiled this July, in a 20-page document—is making their kids fixate on race and attach importance to it in ways that strike them as grotesque.
One parent escaped from a Communist country and saw something all too familiar unfolding:
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.” A teacher in New York City put it most concisely: “To speak against this is to put all of your moral capital at risk.”
This passage about the exclusive Fieldston School in New York is downright chilling:
The science program at Fieldston would make any parent swoon. The electives for 11th- and 12th-graders, according to the school’s website, include immunology, astronomy, neuroscience, and pharmacology.
But physics looks different these days. “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.”
It’s a long article, and you should read the whole thing.
On Twitter, people are reacting to this by recalling other moments in history:
It’s hard to say if the appropriate historical precedent for this self-immolation via woke insanity are the Salem witch trials, the cultural revolution under Mao, or the collective suicide of Jim Jones & the People’s Temple.
— Erik Simon (@erikbiz) March 10, 2021
I don't know who needs to hear this, but erasing the names of white Western men from scientific concepts and giving them more abstract names is LITERALLY WHAT HAPPENED DURING THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION IN CHINA. Liu Cixin even mentions it in the Three Body Problem. https://t.co/If77QC19Df
— Noam Blum (@neontaster) March 10, 2021
Drastic action is needed.
These parents are cowards. These ideas are insane. Pull your kids from these "elite" schools. What will continued exposure to goofy ideas do for their kids' future, ability to think critically and engage in thoughtful informed discourse if the parents are hiding in public?
— The Dumbest Money / Bringer of Shrubbery (@joshuakahn) March 9, 2021
Featured image via YouTube.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Parents at every school need to band together- nip it in the bud.
Go to your school board meetings (even if you have no children in the public schools), run for school board.
Be aware. Be involved.
Indeed. Alas, though, it can seem like an impossible task, because you have so much power lined up against you. For years now high-ranking officials in the NYC Department of Education made openly racist statements and got away with them, or were even praised for them. Asian parents tried to stand up to them and were ignored or demonized for it. The rot is very deep.
Yes. Act-UP. Silence of the Majority emboldens tyrants and ensures tyranny by a few.
I believe parents do to speak out and not worry about being called racists.
The people doing this to their children KNOW they hold this fear over the heads of the parents. Parents: “sack up”! Stop being afraid.
Easier said than done. These parents have been planning to get their kids into Harvard since they saw the first sonogram. A big part of the game is to get them into elite private schools (Dalton, Buckley, Chapin, etc.), which are just the first step in the process. It’s easier for them to “go along to get along” rather than endanger their kid’s chances of success and – in their minds – fail as parents (not to mention earning the scorn of their peers at their law firm, hedge fund, etc.)
I strongly recommend reading the entire article and sharing among your friends.
I have friends who are parents of small children in NYC, and they are scared.
They can send their kids to a public school where not only will the school not even attempt to teach them, but their kids might be in physical danger. And when I say “not attempt to teach them”, I mean it: I have met NYC high school kids who aren’t able to use a tape measure and were unable to learn how because they were confused by fractions such as 1/4 and 3/8.
So, private schools are sought after. And you have to get your three-year-old IQ tested. And survive interviews with the school officials who ask questions like “What does social justice mean to you?” One of my friends was explicitly told that if her then-four-year-old was accepted to their school, the school would discriminate against her because of her Jewish background.
As a parent, what do you do?
In the early years of the homeschooling movement, people were mocked, maligned, and misunderstood for not trusting the educational establishment and wanting to teach their kids at home.
Homeschooling doesn’t seem so crazy now, does it?
My son at Pace University has experienced exactly the same thing. He spoke up just trying to understand statistics that were presented and was immediately categorized as a racist for his questions. No support whatsoever from the instructor. He has since been afraid to speak up about anything unless it follows the narrative. It has been an absolutely awful experience and as a parent extremely fed up with it! Furthermore, they spend more time on deciding which instructors stay and which to fire or force to resign. Incredible with alumni hosting zoom calls to influence the student body.
The recent president at Pace was the president of Oberlin before that, so Pace might be worse than most. That does sound like a very bad experience, and not educational.
Parents need to band together and sue the school.
call it what it is: for CHILDREN K thru 12, it is CHILD ABUSE–teaching children to hate, to feel guilty, to be angry is just dead wrong–projecting all this leftist/woke/fascist nonsense on innocent children’s minds and hearts and to do so deliberately and with impunity is criminal-no other answer
what parent worthy of the title(or for that matter, ANY concerned adult)would allow a child to be abused ? that’s what criminal racist trash really is–concocted to crush feelings of wonder, independence, curiosity, possibilities, enthusiasm for the future, hope for all the opportunities in this life and so many other core emotions/values essential to living a full, productive existence
I’d feel sorry for these parents if they were not so incredibly stupid. You’re spending 50K a year for a private school and don’t like it? Then it’s real easy, band together with 4-6 more parents and start your own education program. 200 -300k will pay for a lot of education.
Pull your kids out of communist brainwashing programs. Don’t allow your children to be abused and do not fear the assholes running those programs.
For that kind of money, a half-dozen parents could band together and hire a tutor to babysit their kids through free, public online K-12 classes.
But let’s be honest — these are elites, so part of the package is sending your kid to an elite HS in preparation for sending them to an elite ivy university in preparation for an elite sinecure. The ultimate problem with this pedigreed pathway is that HS won’t be the last time their children will need to profess their faith in Critical Race Theory — what do they think is waiting for them in university and the workforce?
I wonder how long it will remain elite. Or, will the left succeed in replacing white elites with anti-white elites? This goes beyond just becoming conversant in woke-speak, which could be taught that way and is actually sort of fun, at least with the right sort of sense of humor.
There’s got to be an elite pathway that doesn’t involve subjecting one’s children to this nonsense. Probably some sort of homeschool. Think how much enrichment one could get for the price of these formerly prestigious academies! My kids are older so I am not in that market now. But finding it is the challenge for these parents.
“and the workforce”
Start instilling entrepreneurial traits early. With my children, at four I would pull out a fistful of change and let the count it, when they made a mistake, for each iteration I would divide it again I take about half of it back, and they kept tying until they got something. In a year or two they would be cleaning me out.
I also had an in home company store, where they could buy sale items, with them leaning about paying full price or a discounted price, and if they could tell how much the sales tax would be, I forgave that amount.
There was much more. And since I was self employed, if they were not in school, I constantly wove lessons into every thing we did.
I also have an in home library of about 1000 or so books, covering from preschool to about 8th grade.
“…so part of the package is sending your kid to an elite HS in preparation for sending them to an elite ivy university in preparation for an elite sinecure.”
Yes, this is true. And I think many of the parents are on board with the system anyway, dopey biden voters.
But it appears from the editorial that there are some sane parents that are not happy and they are the ones I don’t get. They can afford to do something.
How many of these parents aren’t paying 50K, but receiving financial aid? That would change the picture significantly.
First threaten to sue, pull a group together, then if they do not comply, pull all those children at once and hire a teacher to teach them. Go to media with the story if they have to be pulled.
I’m a white engineer, so I guess I would be expected to be bothered about “Newton’s Laws” but I am not. Yes Newton does get credit for them. But there is really about one law there not three, in the modern way of thinking — and Newton wasn’t even quite right about that one. (Momentum is conserved unless a net force is applied. Under Newton’s incomplete formulation, there would be no such thing as a rocket, or a figure skater able to prolong her spin by pulling her legs and arms in. The correct law is actually much more interesting. I wish they’d teach it that way! We don’t have time in the curriculum for outmoded historical understandings, great as the advances were at their time.) I advise not getting hung up on this. It’s not a very strong point.
Of course there are many other people in physics and the highly related field of chemistry. Let them be mentioned too! More white men, mostly. Major figures should be mentioned, not minor figures just because they have the “right” demographics.
The other stuff though is plenty of reason to throw out this Critical Theory nonsense. Who would pay $$$ to have one’s kid force-fed such garbage? If only one school would resist they would have a lot of business. It’s strange that the ed business is so captured that there aren’t even non-woke alternatives.
Do you mean that he wrote F=ma rather than F=dp/dt? If so, you are doing Sir Isaac an injustice. He didn’t write any equations, just a paragraph of Latin, but his words clearly express the second, more precise formulation of the law.
Yes of course.
I believe “F=ma” is inline in the text he writes. It’s taught that way in high schools throughout the USA.
Do his words talk about momentum? I’ve never heard that he mentioned it. So I’d need convincing that we’ve been quoting him out of context.
He certainly did not write F=ma. You might find this page interesting: https://www8.physics.utoronto.ca/~jharlow/teaching/everyday06/reading01.htm
I have seen the quote several times but perhaps it is explained here:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/newton-principia/#NewLawMot
*The modern F=ma form of Newton’s second law nowhere occurs in any edition of the Principia even though he had seen his second law formulated in this way in print during the interval between the second and third editions in Jacob Hermann’s Phoronomia of 1716.*
and this is intriguing, maybe he stumbled on the more modern approach in Corollary 3:
*In the early stages of his work on the Principia Newton had identified three logically equivalent alternatives for the third law: the action-reaction principle he ultimately chose, the principle we call conservation of linear momentum (Corollary 3 in the Principia), and the principle that “the common center of gravity of two or more bodies does not change its state whether of motion or of rest as a result of the actions of the bodies upon one another” (Corollary 4).*
Thanks for the pointer. The Stanford article is full of interesting information.
Motivation behind the move is the issue, arty.
“Decentering whiteness”
Sure. They won’t change from that goal. They stay with it because it’s working; logic isn’t the point. I am just trying to direct energy where it will do the most good.
Anyway we can mention Newton and all the other various people involved, a diverse assortment of nationalities. But all white men. Can use this as a reason to bring up 3 or 4 of them, not just one!
Holy moley! Now I realize why all the terms I learned in medical school are being wiped from the textbooks; citric acid cycle instead of Kreb’s cycle, pancreatic islets instead of the islets of Langerhans etc. They are all white!
This is getting way out of hand. I am glad my kids go/went to a parochial school, but how long will they continue to be an alternative, or an unadulterated alternative?
Make non woke alternatives. There is a business opportunity here.
Before these twats get around to renaming Sturgeon’s Law, maybe they ought to read it, then realize they have succeeded in exceeding its upper parameter.