Be careful what you wish for — you just may get it. Some wealthy New York City parents may be learning this the hard way now that their prep school has begun ramming a racialized, anti-white curriculum down their children’s throats.
Perhaps they should have seen this coming at Manhattan’s posh Dalton School. After all, it was reported last year that the small institution planned to hire 12 diversity officers (hey, Yale University already has 150 full-time ones), which partially explains why it charges $54,180 in yearly tuition.
Regardless, a group of Dalton parents is now rebelling against the social engineering and has “circulated a letter of protest, seeking to ensure that Junior and Muffy will not be dumbed down and radicalized in the name of avenging the death of George Floyd of a drug overdose while in custody of the Minneapolis Police,” writes American Thinker.
“It is notable that the parents backing the letter remain anonymous; such is [the] power of casual accusations of ‘racism’ today,” the site continues. “Nonetheless, at least when their privacy is protected, parents can recognize that the demands of the racialists can harm their offspring, curtailing the breadth and depth of their education, degrading their ability to think and be aware of the intellectual heritage of our civilization, and maybe even cheapening the value of the education they receive.”
The New York Post reports on the letter:
The anonymous missive to the “Dalton community,” obtained by the Post, charges the “love of learning and teaching is now being abandoned in favor of an ‘anti-racist’ curriculum.”
It reads, “Every class this year has had an obsessive focus on race and identity, ‘racist cop’ reenactments in science, ‘de-centering whiteness’ in art class, learning about white supremacy and sexuality in health class. Wildly inappropriate, many of these classes feel more akin to a Zoom corporate sensitivity-training than to Dalton’s intellectually engaging curriculum.”
The letter calls for an “impartial ombudsman” outside of the “DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] industry” to advocate for the school’s educational mission and solicit feedback from alumni and parents about changes to the curriculum. It also suggests the school immediately pause the new “anti-racist” curriculum and “anti-racist” teacher training.
Given that at issue are rich white Manhattanites, probability dictates that liberals are well represented among the letter writers. Thus is their case reminiscent of liberal parents’ opposition to a 2015 Brooklyn diversity/desegregation scheme. In that case, one father actually said, “It’s more complicated when it’s about your own children.”
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And once again, at Dalton, the reality of leftism “is hitting people who thought that their money and status could exempt their kids from the damage inflicted on the rest of us,” American Thinker opines.
The reality, though, is that they likely hadn’t “thought” much at all. Value-signaling — one of the ways the wealthy today seek status and prestige among their economic peers — simply feels right when it’s cost-free. It’s easy being idealistic when you don’t have to live with your ideals.
But now Dalton parents do, at least a bit. As the Post further relates:
“In place of a joyful, progressive education, students are exposed to an excessive focus on skin color and sexuality, before they even understand what sex is,” the letter reads.
“Children are bewildered or bored after hours of discussing these topics in the new long-format classes. Dalton used to awaken children’s imagination with fiction, art, Aztec bookmaking, the Renaissance, ITL and Carmino Ravosa musicals. Having children focus on skin color and their sexual identities, rather than immersing them in the beauty and joy of human civilization, the wonder of science and nature, or the meaning of power and words and math and music, seems nuts to us.”
A Dalton dad seethed to The Post Friday, “What we’re seeing at the school now is the atrocious mismanagement of the precious social and intellectual development of children. It’s inexcusable for an institution with a 100-year old pedagogy to have so quickly and sharply shifted to a radical and untested approach to child development and education.”
Well, re-education camps are like that.
This is becoming a common story, though. For example, ex-Fox News journalist Megyn Kelly announced late last year that she was withdrawing her children from the tony Collegiate School on the Upper West Side — tuition about 56k a year — complaining that the institution had “gone off the deep end.”
Aside from the evident lunacy of the racialist curricula, which speaks for itself, this story also reflects our rampant relativism: People not rooted to the eternal easily fall sway to the ephemeral. This also is nothing new. As philosopher G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1910 in What’s Wrong with the World:
The trouble in too many of our modern schools is that the State, being controlled so specially by the few, allows cranks and experiments to go straight to the schoolroom when they have never passed through the Parliament, the public house, the private house, the church, or the marketplace. Obviously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school to-day the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four actually has more experience, and has weathered the world longer, than the dogma to which he is made to submit. Many a school boasts of having the last ideas in education, when it has not even the first idea.
There’s a name, mind you, for the kind of person who easily falls for fashions, for the latest “cool” things: a child. And that is part of the problem in education today: Innocent children are being taught by the corrupted and childish.
