I remember how it was -- JR
Elite NYC private schools are teaching kids that American society must be destroyed
Ryan Finlay is a brave young man. A senior at the elite private Horace Mann School, Finlay last week published a pointed but measured essay describing the aggressive political bias that’s dominated his education on the Bronx campus, where generations of famous and well-connected New Yorkers, from Jack Kerouac to Eliot Spitzer, have matriculated or sent their children.
Faculty “feel obligated to open students’ eyes to the inequality that surrounds them,” Finlay explained, but that takes the form of “continuous pressure in the classroom to embrace visions of wholesale societal reform.”
The message, hammered relentlessly into students’ heads at Horace Mann, is that “the system is broken, unable to be reformed, rotten to the core, and deserving of demolition,” he wrote.
The irony of hyper-privileged New Yorkers paying nearly $60,000 a year for their children to learn they are the undeserving beneficiaries of a broken system need not be dwelled upon here. Finlay’s essay breaks the self-imposed conspiracy of silence that has largely shielded top private schools from criticism from within.
There have been rare exceptions of dissident teachers like Paul Rossi of the Grace School and “Brearley Dad” Andrew Gutmann, who blow the whistle on private-school indoctrination. But few are willing to do so publicly. The largely unquestioned proposition is that private prep schools are the gateway to elite universities and America’s leadership class, an academic arms race famously described in a New York magazine cover story 25 years ago as “Give me Harvard, or give me death.”
This explains how the parent body of these schools can be sloppy with C-suite executives and boldface names from media, film and television who grow unaccountably meek and humble in the face of private-school admissions officers and headmasters despite their aggressive, Type A personalities in every other facet of their lives.
Finlay’s very public essay is a tacit rebuke to parents, like those at the exclusive Dalton School, who penned an open letter complaining that “love of learning and teaching is now being abandoned in favor of an ‘anti-racist’ curriculum” but were too timid to sign their names to the seven-page complaint.
Wealthy parents can afford to purchase billboards anonymously demanding elite private schools teach their kids “how to think, not what to think.” But they cannot afford to put at risk their children’s shot at the Ivy League, so they sit and seethe, lest their children be deemed not a good fit and “counseled out.”
The more troubling picture Finlay paints is of a drifting and deeply anti-intellectual institution. It’s a devastating strike at the heart of another story affluent parents comfort themselves with: that the obscene price they pay for elite private school is not about protecting their privilege. Given the chaotic state of public education, there’s simply no other way for children to get a rich and stimulating education. But Finlay makes clear, the object of social justice-related curricula at Horace Mann “is not for the material to be challenged, but absorbed without question.”
The real lesson students are learning is not critical thinking and deep engagement with ideas. It’s self-censorship and risk assessment. “It’s not worth jeopardizing academic success at HM in exchange for political expression,” he concludes.
In the end, exclusive private schools have led themselves into a box canyon from which there can be no honest escape. Like an organism that devours its host, their commitment to equity, inclusivity and “dismantling privilege” requires that privileged New Yorkers continue spending north of half a million dollars in tuition for their children to learn that their privileges are unearned and undeserved.
And what reason do elite universities’ admissions offices have to continue to look favorably upon prep school graduates when they too are committed to equity? Surely an Ivy League acceptance letter is wasted on someone who was born on third base.
Unless, of course, it’s all a cynical exercise with all involved — parents and faculty alike — believing their professed commitment to social justice insures them against practicing what they preach.
Because let’s be honest. There’s really only one surefire way for elite private schools to demonstrate their commitment to dismantling privilege: Close their doors and cease operations.
https://nypost.com/2022/06/16/elite-nyc-private-schools-are-teaching-kids-to-hate-america/
*********************************************CRT and LGBT in the Classroom: Americans Have Had Enough
The U.S. education system appears to have been hijacked by people with a specific agenda. Actual education has been replaced by indoctrination, teachers replaced by activists pushing nefarious agendas.
Young children are being exposed to provocative, highly-sexualized content. They’re also being encouraged to question their privilege and supposedly racist roots.
However, all is not lost. More and more Americans are speaking up against the madness. They have had enough. According to the latest University of Massachusetts Amherst Poll, an increasing number of Americans want the insanity, or the slide into insanity, to stop—and they want it to stop now.
The vast majority of respondents stated that teachers asking children in grades K-6 for their preferred gender pronouns was wrong. The vast majority also said they were against the idea of assigning children in grades K-6 books that discuss transgender issues. They also opposed the idea of teachers discussing their sexual orientation with young children.
Commenting on the poll, author Don Surber had this to say: “LGBT classes are indoctrination, not education.” The same could be said about CRT classes. As Surber noted, although “CRT proponents claim this is only taught in college, they should have no problem with banning teaching a racist and anti-American doctrine that seeks to discredit the Constitution.” But, for some strange reason, “proof of CRT instruction in schools keeps popping up.”
Surber finished by asking a pertinent question: “If so many people oppose teaching CRT and LGBT, why are these subjects being taught in public schools?”
He’s right. How did we get here? I’ll tell you how. Last year, in an article for The American Mind, I discussed something called the gated institutional narrative (GIN), a concept first put forward by the polymath Eric Weinstein. The GIN perfectly encapsulates the madness that has swept, and continues to sweep, through the U.S. education system.
As I said at the time, the “GIN explains the ways in which heavily filtered information is presented to the public by the mainstream media and academics.” Take the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” for example. Although the project has been lambasted by highly-respected commentators, it still, for some unfathomable reason, carries a great deal of authority.
On closer inspection, however, the reason it carries so much authority is entirely understandable. After all, the project was initiated by the NY Times, one of the most influential papers on the planet. Additionally, its historically inaccurate narrative has been pushed by comparably powerful outlets, frequently and forcefully. Furthermore, it appeals not to facts, but to feelings. In this age of speaking “your truth” instead of the truth, the NY Times decided to tell its “truth.”
The GIN, as I said in The American Mind piece, “is like an exclusive nightclub. Only the right kind of people can enter.” Orthodox thinkers—in other words, people willing to follow the herd—are the only people permitted entry. Those who refuse to comply are quickly turned away. “Go away and sober up,” they’re told.
Bad ideas beget bad ideas—the inaccurate (often pernicious) ideas generated within the GIN bounce around in a gigantic echo chamber. Then, like a swift missile strike, they’re launched into broader society.
At the same time, good ideas—that is, ideas that counter the bad ones created within the system—are intentionally blocked from entering. With such a design, it’s easy to see how bad ideas, even wicked ones, continue to circulate and become more virulent in nature.
Bad Ideas Spread Like a Virus
In his latest book, aptly titled “The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense,” Dr. Gad Saad discusses how bad ideas, or “idea pathogens,” spread like a virus, killing common sense in the process. In the American education system, as you’re no doubt aware, commonsense is in short supply.
If in doubt, let me point you in the direction of a recent piece written by Jonathan Turley, one of the country’s leading legal scholars. Unlike so many involved in academia, Turley has a backbone. He has a significant voice and is not afraid to use it. Instead of echoing the narratives of the GIN, Turley exposes the absurdities occurring within the gated community.
In the insular world of academia, he noted, “there have been growing controversies over language guides and usages, including the use of pronouns that some object to as matters of religion or grammar.” Now he warned, the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), “the largest association of science teachers in the world,” wants to add to the controversy.
Take a read of the NSTA’s latest guide, and you’ll quickly see that Turley’s concerns are very much warranted. The educators are now pushing for “gender-inclusive biology.” What, you’re probably wondering, could this new-age biology entail?
In short, unscientific calls to permanently abandon everyday terms like “men,” “women,” “parent,” “mother,” and “father.” Mothers, according to the guide, should only be referred to as “persons with ovaries.” Fathers, meanwhile, should be referred to as “persons with testes.”
Although tens of millions of Americans have had enough, don’t expect the GIN to stop churning out bad ideas anytime soon.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/crt-and-lgbt-in-the-classroom-americans-have-had-enough_4529306.html
***********************************************Australia: "Dark Emu" rebuttal added to school reading list
"Dark Emu" is a monstrous work of fiction parading as history. But the Left love it. They routinely ignore the facts. That's what they do
A critique of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu has been included by Victoria’s curriculum authority on a resource list for the state’s Australian history teachers to use in the classroom.
In the latest challenge to Professor Pascoe’s work, a book by anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe – which says Dark Emu relies on colonial accounts as sources – has been endorsed by the state’s curriculum chiefs.
Professor Pascoe says before European conquest, Indigenous Australians engaged in sophisticated agricultural and farming techniques. He contends that precolonial Aboriginal people sometimes lived in houses and villages and employed technology to harvest food.
Professor Sutton and Dr Walshe challenge this, claiming Indigenous Australians were “complex hunter-gatherers”.
Their work, Farmers or hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu debate, was published last year and has been added to a list of optional resources, alongside Dark Emu, for teachers and now thousands of year 11 and 12 students across the state to use in the study of Australian history.
Professor Sutton, from the University of Adelaide and the South Australian museum, said if students were being given Dark Emu without a critical analysis of the work, they were being “misled”.
“I think that’s quite shameful. Let’s say the Dalai Lama tells you that two and two makes five. You say, look, with all due respect, your spiritual highness, two and two does not make five,” he told The Australian.
“So this issue is not really about Bruce … It’s about whether students are being guided … in terms of reliable sources of factual information.”
Professor Pascoe’s 2014 work, Dark Emu Black Seeds: agriculture or accident?, has been included on the same list since at least 2015 according to a VCAA resource list dated that year.
It argues that the economy and culture of Indigenous Australians before European conquest has been undervalued, and that journals and diaries of explorers revealed “a much more complicated Aboriginal economy than the primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle we had been told was the simple lot of Australia’s First People.”
Professor Sutton and Dr Walshe “contend that Pascoe is broadly wrong” and say Indigenous Australians were “hunter-gatherers-plus” whose “hunting, fishing and gathering economy was far more complex than might be imagined from the word ‘mere’.”
Dark Emu is listed as an optional resource in two NSW high school subject “sample programs” – they include stage 6 Investigating science and Stage 4 Technology Mandatory – but it is not a prescribed text. Nor is Professor Sutton’s work.
Queensland and Western Australia recommend neither book as a prescribed or recommended resource.
Professor Sutton, an anthropologist since 1969, said students should have the opportunity to review both pieces of work, not Dark Emu alone. “(Dark Emu should) either be excluded on the basis that it’s been disproved by the heavy weight of Aboriginal evidence in our expert opinion or you present both that book and its answer and you get the students to compare the pair,” he said.
“I often say to people ‘Don‘t read our book first. Go and buy a copy of Dark Emu, have a good read, then read ours,’ ”
Professor Pascoe did not respond to a request for comment.
A spokesman from Victoria’s Department of Education said books were selected by individual schools to support teachers in delivering the state’s curriculum.
“Texts to support the implementation of the Victorian curriculum are determined by individual schools, consistent with advice provided by the Department of Education and Training on the selection of suitable teaching resources,” he said.
“Farmers or hunter-gatherers: The Dark Emu debate" by Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe is not on any of the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority’s prescribed text lists for senior secondary VCE studies. However, the book is on a list of optional resources that teachers may use to explore a range of different interpretations of the past in the study of VCE Australian History Units 3 and 4.”
Professor Sutton described his work as a “forensic examination” of Professor Pascoe’s, whom he said omitted evidence that did not suit his theory and relied too heavily on the work of European explorers.
Professor Sutton’s work is included in the optional reading list for the VCE subject area “from custodianship to the Anthropocene (60,000 BCE-1901)”.
A spokeswoman for the national curriculum authority, the Australian Curriculum and Assessment Reporting Authority, said it did not recommend books for students to read.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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