An English teacher named Dana Stangel-Plowe has quit her job at the Dwight-Englewood School in New Jersey over their decision to implement Critical Race Theory in the school’s curriculum.
Her description of the effect this ideology has had on students and staff is disturbing.
Dana Kennedy and Tamar Lapin report at the New York Post:
Teacher at posh NJ prep school quits over critical race theoryAn English teacher has resigned from a top New Jersey prep school that is using critical race theory to create a “hostile culture of conformity and fear” — causing white and male students to believe they are “oppressors,” she said.Dana Stangel-Plowe accused the Dwight-Englewood School in Bergen County of forcing students and faculty to embrace a single set of beliefs, choking off free speech in the process.“The school’s ideology requires students to see themselves not as individuals, but as representatives of a group, forcing them to adopt the status of privilege or victimhood,” Stangel-Plowe wrote in her letter to school brass.“As a result, students arrive in my classroom accepting this theory as fact: People born with less melanin in their skin are oppressors, and people born with more melanin in their skin are oppressed. Men are oppressors, women are oppressed, and so on,” she continued.
Stangel-Plowe published her resignation letter. Here is an excerpt via FAIR (Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism):
In my classroom, I see up close how this orthodoxy hinders students’ ability to read, write, and think. I teach students who recoil from a poem because it was written by a man. I teach students who approach texts in search of the oppressor. I teach students who see inequities in texts that have nothing to do with power. Students have internalized the message that this is the way we read and think about the world, and as a result, they fixate on power and group identity. This fixation has stunted their ability to observe and engage with the full fabric of human experience in our literature.In my professional opinion, the school is failing to encourage healthy habits of mind, essential for growth, such as intellectual curiosity, humility, honesty, reason, and the capacity to question ideas and consider multiple perspectives. In our school, the opportunity to hear competing ideas is practically non-existent. How can students, who accept a single ideology as fact, learn to practice intellectual curiosity or humility or consider a competing idea they’ve never encountered? How can students develop higher order thinking if they are limited to seeing the world only through the lens of group identity and power?Sadly, the school is leading many to become true believers and outspoken purveyors of a regressive and illiberal orthodoxy. Understandably, these students have found comfort in their moral certainty, and so they have become rigid and closed-minded, unable or unwilling to consider alternative perspectives.
In the video below, Stangel Plowe goes over all of this in detail. She describes incidents at the school that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, such as administrators segregating teachers by race at a faculty meeting. Watch:
It’s worth noting that this issue keeps coming up at exclusive private schools. In January, parents at the Dalton School in New York objected to a similar situation.
In March, we reported on parents at the Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles who held meetings in secret to figure out how to oppose the implementation of this ideology.
In April, a father in New York City went viral after pulling his daughter out of the Brearley School and penning a letter condemning the school’s adoption of Critical Race Theory.
Featured image via YouTube.
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