I am reading all of your comments. Thank you for sharing your thoughts -- especially those parents with skin in the game. Given how much passion there is around this subject, I think later this week I'll respond to a bunch of these comments in a column. Please keep sharing! I am much more likely to see them here than on email.
I am a parent. I'm not afraid to speak my mind. This radical woke movement is like the Cultural Revolution in China, where my father's uncle was marched through the street wearing a sign (simply because he was an educated, architect and considered affluent) while an angry mob pelted him with fruit and rocks and ultimately bludgeoned him to death. My great grandfather was a Chinese War Lord. Am I guilty of all his murdering and raping and pillaging? It makes no sense to punish people for the sins of their ancestors who lived a century ago or more. You what IS racist? Teaching little children to identify and categorize themselves according to their skin color, calling attention to it. They don't know the difference! To them, it's like when a dog has a little of black, brown and cream puppies. They're all the same! This whole woke revolution is going to destroy America if it is allowed to continue. This is the land of equal opportunity, not equal outcomes for all. My mother was an immigrant. I went to an "Ivy League" school, not because I am Asian and therefore "white-adjacent" but because I had a Tiger Mom who made me stay home and freaking study while everyone else got to have sleepovers, go to concerts and play soccer!
Here’s my modest proposal from the sidelines. Rather than complain and throw their hands up, why not organize even if anonymously or parents whose kids are already college bound and are beyond school retaliation? They could present a public manifesto.
The preamble should list some of the tenets of wokeness and Critical Race Theory. The demands should flow quite naturally from those tenets. Among them might be a demand to:
1. Spend the entire endowment to (a) upgrade local public schools in predominantly minority areas, (b) provide free internet to all minority families in those schools, (c) provide free tutoring to all minority students in need.
2. Immediately terminate all “white” administrators and faculty as they have a conflict of interest in teaching “white fragility” and their very presence in positions of authority risks making the school’s non-white students insecure and vulnerable.
3. Have these “white” administrators and faculty publish essays explaining why they deserve to be terminated in not less than 1,619 words.
You get the point: expose them and the incoherence of their propaganda by simply following it to its logical conclusion. Let them try to explain why these demands are not appropriate. They deserve to all be held up to ridicule. Will it work? We will never know until some brave souls step up.
I might add that if you want to understand how/why your neighbors voted for Trump - and how we/they overlooked his obvious flaws? Perhaps we were on to something. We felt the threat from the woke cult was far more dangerous/insidious to the welfare of the country.
I am one of these parents, but in a highly rated urban public school where the new principal has implemented this type of social justice curriculum. My concerns have zero to do with getting into the Ivy League, which doesn't even strike me as a healthy place nowadays. They have to do with not wanting my kid indoctrinated into this dangerous nonsense.
Sorry, but us parents DO deserve a lot of sympathy: Figuring out where to send our daughter to school — how to get in, how to pay for it — was the single most stressful thing we went through as parents in the first five years. And when I say how to get in, I'm not talking about Dalton. Even the good public schools come with wait lists and lotteries. You have to apply well in advance and you have to be able to afford to live in a good district or catchment area. And once you finally get past those hurdles, when you find out (thanks largely to remote schooling) that the constant, relentless ideology makes this institution intolerable for your family, there is the sheer horror of wondering what the alternative is. It's easy to pull your kid out, but she has to go somewhere. Where? You can research schools by academic ratings, but not by ideology.
This is happening everywhere in North America, seemingly. I live in Canada and my children attend a private Christian high school. The same is being taught here. From my conversations with parents whose kids are in public school, it's even worse there.
There is a grand strategy here. The question is: what is it?
Divide and conquer? Economic inequality being manifest via racial means? Could it be a purposeful distraction from the wealth accumulation going on at the top? Or is it simply the result of the fast-approaching end of Western Civilization's dominance?
What is currently being taught to my children is actually causing the very thing they're "apparently" trying to avoid. I've become quite cynical about what the real motive is.
It is taking everything my wife and I have to keep our teenage sons focused on what's positive in their education. Literally every single school night we are mired in yet another discussion at the dinner table about a new outrage around race and/or politics that's engulfing their school. And nearly all of it is happening in the classroom, as opposed to incidents taking place during recess or lunch. This is being facilitated by the curriculum.
An education system predicts the future course of a nation, and given the current trends I'm not optimistic. My German, English and Jewish ancestors came to the United States and Canada in the 1840's, fleeing religious oppression in Europe and Russia. As I've told my wife, we may need to think outside of the box the same way previous generations did.
What future do my sons have in a nation that is actively teaching them this nonsense? None.
The answer is that as parents we need to recognize that first and foremost our responsibility is to raise strong, discerning adults. I am lucky enough to live in a Red State where private Christian schools are pushing back against this and not letting it impact the schools. If you don't have the options available where you live, you need to home school your kids. It's huge sacrifice but there are so many HS options now that are online you can do it without actually having to teach them as a parent. I have a senior in HS and a freshman. We are investigating all colleges that we are looking toward to ensure CRT is not part of their curriculum. YOU control the education your kids receive and as parents if we aren't willing to do this we contribute in a negative manner to the adults they become. If we aren't willing to stand up to this simply because we want Little Johnny to go to Duke or an Ivy League school then we are part of the problem. I heard Dennis Prager speak once and he stated that he didn't care what college his kids went to or even if they went to college. ( In todays' world a liberal arts education does nothing for you so unless your child is going to college for a specific professional track often technical school is a better choice anyway. Just ask Google HR ) He cared what kind of adult they became. That's what we should all be worrying about.
That these parents are more concerned over the acceptance of the Ivy League is disappointing. At some point, with the worlds "leading" universities cranking out woke halfwits, there will eventually be a market driven call for people that understand math and are capable of critical thinking. Right now business sees "white fragility" presentations as a check-the-block against some lawsuit down the line. But in 15 years when every promising young individual from Dartmouth is a complaining AND incompetent boob, those parents with children that chose education over pedigree (because they're clearly not the same thing anymore) will have a child prepared to earn a living. You don't need to go to Yale to earn six figures - but you do need to go to Yale so that you can say you went to Yale.
They're teaching them what to think instead of how to think. Pull the kids out and hire an old school private teacher that challenges them to think; a teacher who challenges them with logic. They will be able to think circles around these race baiting automatons. The kids will do far better in life being able to think for themselves. They should not only have a degree; but they should be able to combine two more disparate thoughts together to create something new. Brain washed thought prisoners can't do this. They will wind up angry and confused and totally unable to defend their positions or ideas, should they have any. They will have to resort to shutting down their opponents speech with sticks and stones and meaningless words like racist or X-Phobe or whatever. Shame on us for letting it get this far. Shame on us.
Thank you for focusing on this topic. I work in a suburban public high school in an affluent community and this is the direction the administration is moving in. Our focus has shifted from academic excellence to identity politics. As you describe in the article, this emphasis is rapidly spreading into all areas of the curriculum, including STEM classes.
Virtually of my colleagues are sympathetic to the goals of the administration and want to help students from historically marginalized groups succeed. But some of us are worried that we are going to achieve "equity" by promoting mediocrity. It's genuinely alarming and I wish I could switch careers. Unfortunately, I am not in a financial position to do that.
Ok, so what is the solution? Coming from a country that was 40+ years under Communist regime I know (or hope) that every totalitarian nonsense will go away, eventually. But I also know that those 40 years destroyed many many lives. So let’s push back before it’s too late.
For the parents here who haven’t heard of it, there is a website that tracks critical race theory in higher education....https://criticalrace.org/. You can look at schools by state to see which colleges/universities teach CRT. You can also send info on schools to them. I recently sent them info about the liberal arts college I graduated from 17 years ago...it now has a social justice minor that is clearly based on CRT. (I felt bad emailing about it, but this ideology is dangerous and divisive...and it pisses me off and this is one small way to stand up to it.) I was a government major and sociology minor, which are now probably unbearable classes to take due to the amount of indoctrination. In one of my senior year government seminars, the professor gave us a list of books to choose from to read and analyze. I chose “Uncivil Wars” by David Horowitz, which is about the controversy around reparations for slavery and about the attempts by the Left to completely shut down conversations about the topic by shaming people and yelling “racist.” (I never thought I would see that behavior in action, but welcome to the US in 2021...!!!) What I remember most about the book was the description of the tactics used by the Left as a way to shut down conversation without having a conversation. Horowitz was a communist early in life and drastically changed his views to conservatism...so he knew both sides well. The book made me realize that people are constantly evolving, learning, and changing...even to the point that they abandon long held political views. The importance of open dialogue on important topics and the possibility for people to change have stayed with me. What I learned from that book has stayed with me. What’s sad is that students at this college, and many many others, are probably not allowed to read anything like this anymore.
I don't have any sympathy for these parents. They are cowards , bad parents and non-patriotic. They would rather let their kids and country suffer and they risk their kids getting into the Ivy leagues. They disgrace every solider that has died for this country. Their kids are seeing and learning from this. They need to either 1) fight or 2 leave. that is their choice.
People need to stand up to this disgusting ideology and divest their money from institutions & companies like these. Send the message: Get Woke, Go Broke.
People generally become affluent professionals by doing what they are told by authority figures. These parents themselves are the kids that got As, not because they were necessarily smart or original thinkers, but because they were obedient. They are those who as kids themselves were trained to always give the right answer, always go with the flow, be one of the "good" kids and sit at the "right" social lunch table and have the "right" activities, and say what those in power tell you to say so you can get your grades, diploma, recommendation letters, and eventually, the "right" job or professional license.
It's why not just schools and universities, but professional associations like the AMA and APA (which I used to belong to) fall so easily on board with this junk. Because elites and well educated professionals are NOT brave people. We are generally people who learn at a very young age to walk in lockstep so we can build and preserve our status. If someone or a movement comes along that says "promote and believe this or we will make your life hard, ruin your reputation, and threaten your career" there are very, very few professional class people who are going to take that risk and resist. So we all nod along to whatever insanity a small few promote, and we do so out of fear and a desire to avoid conflict and possible professional ruin.
I also think increasing secularization makes people more vulnerable. Secular people often (not always, but often) have no rich ethical or intellectual tradition, no template for what resistance looks like, nor a higher value or meaning to appeal to for meaning and spiritual security when they are in crisis. If your class status and profession and position on the PTA is your God, you will cling to it by any means, including compromising your personal integrity and avoiding debate.
A person who grew up in a tradition like Judaism or Christianity has a lot more grounding from which to make a stand on. You have a rigorous background in a rich and ancient intellectual tradition to draw ideas from. Through traditions like Midrash or Scholasticism you have learned how to debate real ideas with rigor and logic. You know what justice is, and what justice is not. You understand both the glorious potential of humanity and also have a healthy suspicion of its weaknesses, and you can clearly see this balance of universal human dignity and frailty in the people you interact with in your daily life, and interact with them accordingly. You have models of resistance from Elijah to Daniel in the Lions Den to the Maccabees to Jesus and Martin Luther and the Saints and Martyrs. You have the Psalms and prayer and the reassurance of something higher and an ultimate fulfillment to the universe to give you strength when the secular world is against you. You can say, with Julian, that All Will Be Well.
No wonder so many secular white collar professionals who start to feel rebellions are so anxious. It might be the first time in their lives they have ever dared to rebel. And many have no template for what rebellion looks like, or any higher belief to sustain them through the conflict or give meaning.
I was raised in a devout Lutheran family and converted to Catholicism in college. I graduated from a strong small Catholic college. In my late 20s / early 30s I got a professional degree, went to work for a major institution in NYC, and went through a phase where I was very attached to my career and a little embarrassed about my religious background. I started to go with the intersectional flow and went through a phase where I thought my former faith was "oppressive."
But I have rediscovered it in the last two years. I am so thankful for the foundation that my little midwestern Lutheran sunday school and the Franciscans in Steubenville laid for me now. The belief system I had once thought "oppressive" and "regressive" is now the foundation of an incredible liberty.
My daughters are headed to Catholic School for this very reason next year. And God knows that my own psalter has become very worn out in the last twelve months.
I am reading all of your comments. Thank you for sharing your thoughts -- especially those parents with skin in the game. Given how much passion there is around this subject, I think later this week I'll respond to a bunch of these comments in a column. Please keep sharing! I am much more likely to see them here than on email.
I am a parent. I'm not afraid to speak my mind. This radical woke movement is like the Cultural Revolution in China, where my father's uncle was marched through the street wearing a sign (simply because he was an educated, architect and considered affluent) while an angry mob pelted him with fruit and rocks and ultimately bludgeoned him to death. My great grandfather was a Chinese War Lord. Am I guilty of all his murdering and raping and pillaging? It makes no sense to punish people for the sins of their ancestors who lived a century ago or more. You what IS racist? Teaching little children to identify and categorize themselves according to their skin color, calling attention to it. They don't know the difference! To them, it's like when a dog has a little of black, brown and cream puppies. They're all the same! This whole woke revolution is going to destroy America if it is allowed to continue. This is the land of equal opportunity, not equal outcomes for all. My mother was an immigrant. I went to an "Ivy League" school, not because I am Asian and therefore "white-adjacent" but because I had a Tiger Mom who made me stay home and freaking study while everyone else got to have sleepovers, go to concerts and play soccer!
Here’s my modest proposal from the sidelines. Rather than complain and throw their hands up, why not organize even if anonymously or parents whose kids are already college bound and are beyond school retaliation? They could present a public manifesto.
The preamble should list some of the tenets of wokeness and Critical Race Theory. The demands should flow quite naturally from those tenets. Among them might be a demand to:
1. Spend the entire endowment to (a) upgrade local public schools in predominantly minority areas, (b) provide free internet to all minority families in those schools, (c) provide free tutoring to all minority students in need.
2. Immediately terminate all “white” administrators and faculty as they have a conflict of interest in teaching “white fragility” and their very presence in positions of authority risks making the school’s non-white students insecure and vulnerable.
3. Have these “white” administrators and faculty publish essays explaining why they deserve to be terminated in not less than 1,619 words.
You get the point: expose them and the incoherence of their propaganda by simply following it to its logical conclusion. Let them try to explain why these demands are not appropriate. They deserve to all be held up to ridicule. Will it work? We will never know until some brave souls step up.
I might add that if you want to understand how/why your neighbors voted for Trump - and how we/they overlooked his obvious flaws? Perhaps we were on to something. We felt the threat from the woke cult was far more dangerous/insidious to the welfare of the country.
I am one of these parents, but in a highly rated urban public school where the new principal has implemented this type of social justice curriculum. My concerns have zero to do with getting into the Ivy League, which doesn't even strike me as a healthy place nowadays. They have to do with not wanting my kid indoctrinated into this dangerous nonsense.
Sorry, but us parents DO deserve a lot of sympathy: Figuring out where to send our daughter to school — how to get in, how to pay for it — was the single most stressful thing we went through as parents in the first five years. And when I say how to get in, I'm not talking about Dalton. Even the good public schools come with wait lists and lotteries. You have to apply well in advance and you have to be able to afford to live in a good district or catchment area. And once you finally get past those hurdles, when you find out (thanks largely to remote schooling) that the constant, relentless ideology makes this institution intolerable for your family, there is the sheer horror of wondering what the alternative is. It's easy to pull your kid out, but she has to go somewhere. Where? You can research schools by academic ratings, but not by ideology.
This is happening everywhere in North America, seemingly. I live in Canada and my children attend a private Christian high school. The same is being taught here. From my conversations with parents whose kids are in public school, it's even worse there.
There is a grand strategy here. The question is: what is it?
Divide and conquer? Economic inequality being manifest via racial means? Could it be a purposeful distraction from the wealth accumulation going on at the top? Or is it simply the result of the fast-approaching end of Western Civilization's dominance?
What is currently being taught to my children is actually causing the very thing they're "apparently" trying to avoid. I've become quite cynical about what the real motive is.
It is taking everything my wife and I have to keep our teenage sons focused on what's positive in their education. Literally every single school night we are mired in yet another discussion at the dinner table about a new outrage around race and/or politics that's engulfing their school. And nearly all of it is happening in the classroom, as opposed to incidents taking place during recess or lunch. This is being facilitated by the curriculum.
An education system predicts the future course of a nation, and given the current trends I'm not optimistic. My German, English and Jewish ancestors came to the United States and Canada in the 1840's, fleeing religious oppression in Europe and Russia. As I've told my wife, we may need to think outside of the box the same way previous generations did.
What future do my sons have in a nation that is actively teaching them this nonsense? None.
This is terrifying and true. Also imbedded in this critical race theory is a not-so-subtle antisemitic undertone.
The answer is that as parents we need to recognize that first and foremost our responsibility is to raise strong, discerning adults. I am lucky enough to live in a Red State where private Christian schools are pushing back against this and not letting it impact the schools. If you don't have the options available where you live, you need to home school your kids. It's huge sacrifice but there are so many HS options now that are online you can do it without actually having to teach them as a parent. I have a senior in HS and a freshman. We are investigating all colleges that we are looking toward to ensure CRT is not part of their curriculum. YOU control the education your kids receive and as parents if we aren't willing to do this we contribute in a negative manner to the adults they become. If we aren't willing to stand up to this simply because we want Little Johnny to go to Duke or an Ivy League school then we are part of the problem. I heard Dennis Prager speak once and he stated that he didn't care what college his kids went to or even if they went to college. ( In todays' world a liberal arts education does nothing for you so unless your child is going to college for a specific professional track often technical school is a better choice anyway. Just ask Google HR ) He cared what kind of adult they became. That's what we should all be worrying about.
That these parents are more concerned over the acceptance of the Ivy League is disappointing. At some point, with the worlds "leading" universities cranking out woke halfwits, there will eventually be a market driven call for people that understand math and are capable of critical thinking. Right now business sees "white fragility" presentations as a check-the-block against some lawsuit down the line. But in 15 years when every promising young individual from Dartmouth is a complaining AND incompetent boob, those parents with children that chose education over pedigree (because they're clearly not the same thing anymore) will have a child prepared to earn a living. You don't need to go to Yale to earn six figures - but you do need to go to Yale so that you can say you went to Yale.
They're teaching them what to think instead of how to think. Pull the kids out and hire an old school private teacher that challenges them to think; a teacher who challenges them with logic. They will be able to think circles around these race baiting automatons. The kids will do far better in life being able to think for themselves. They should not only have a degree; but they should be able to combine two more disparate thoughts together to create something new. Brain washed thought prisoners can't do this. They will wind up angry and confused and totally unable to defend their positions or ideas, should they have any. They will have to resort to shutting down their opponents speech with sticks and stones and meaningless words like racist or X-Phobe or whatever. Shame on us for letting it get this far. Shame on us.
Thank you for focusing on this topic. I work in a suburban public high school in an affluent community and this is the direction the administration is moving in. Our focus has shifted from academic excellence to identity politics. As you describe in the article, this emphasis is rapidly spreading into all areas of the curriculum, including STEM classes.
Virtually of my colleagues are sympathetic to the goals of the administration and want to help students from historically marginalized groups succeed. But some of us are worried that we are going to achieve "equity" by promoting mediocrity. It's genuinely alarming and I wish I could switch careers. Unfortunately, I am not in a financial position to do that.
Ok, so what is the solution? Coming from a country that was 40+ years under Communist regime I know (or hope) that every totalitarian nonsense will go away, eventually. But I also know that those 40 years destroyed many many lives. So let’s push back before it’s too late.
For the parents here who haven’t heard of it, there is a website that tracks critical race theory in higher education....https://criticalrace.org/. You can look at schools by state to see which colleges/universities teach CRT. You can also send info on schools to them. I recently sent them info about the liberal arts college I graduated from 17 years ago...it now has a social justice minor that is clearly based on CRT. (I felt bad emailing about it, but this ideology is dangerous and divisive...and it pisses me off and this is one small way to stand up to it.) I was a government major and sociology minor, which are now probably unbearable classes to take due to the amount of indoctrination. In one of my senior year government seminars, the professor gave us a list of books to choose from to read and analyze. I chose “Uncivil Wars” by David Horowitz, which is about the controversy around reparations for slavery and about the attempts by the Left to completely shut down conversations about the topic by shaming people and yelling “racist.” (I never thought I would see that behavior in action, but welcome to the US in 2021...!!!) What I remember most about the book was the description of the tactics used by the Left as a way to shut down conversation without having a conversation. Horowitz was a communist early in life and drastically changed his views to conservatism...so he knew both sides well. The book made me realize that people are constantly evolving, learning, and changing...even to the point that they abandon long held political views. The importance of open dialogue on important topics and the possibility for people to change have stayed with me. What I learned from that book has stayed with me. What’s sad is that students at this college, and many many others, are probably not allowed to read anything like this anymore.
I don't have any sympathy for these parents. They are cowards , bad parents and non-patriotic. They would rather let their kids and country suffer and they risk their kids getting into the Ivy leagues. They disgrace every solider that has died for this country. Their kids are seeing and learning from this. They need to either 1) fight or 2 leave. that is their choice.
People need to stand up to this disgusting ideology and divest their money from institutions & companies like these. Send the message: Get Woke, Go Broke.
People generally become affluent professionals by doing what they are told by authority figures. These parents themselves are the kids that got As, not because they were necessarily smart or original thinkers, but because they were obedient. They are those who as kids themselves were trained to always give the right answer, always go with the flow, be one of the "good" kids and sit at the "right" social lunch table and have the "right" activities, and say what those in power tell you to say so you can get your grades, diploma, recommendation letters, and eventually, the "right" job or professional license.
It's why not just schools and universities, but professional associations like the AMA and APA (which I used to belong to) fall so easily on board with this junk. Because elites and well educated professionals are NOT brave people. We are generally people who learn at a very young age to walk in lockstep so we can build and preserve our status. If someone or a movement comes along that says "promote and believe this or we will make your life hard, ruin your reputation, and threaten your career" there are very, very few professional class people who are going to take that risk and resist. So we all nod along to whatever insanity a small few promote, and we do so out of fear and a desire to avoid conflict and possible professional ruin.
I also think increasing secularization makes people more vulnerable. Secular people often (not always, but often) have no rich ethical or intellectual tradition, no template for what resistance looks like, nor a higher value or meaning to appeal to for meaning and spiritual security when they are in crisis. If your class status and profession and position on the PTA is your God, you will cling to it by any means, including compromising your personal integrity and avoiding debate.
A person who grew up in a tradition like Judaism or Christianity has a lot more grounding from which to make a stand on. You have a rigorous background in a rich and ancient intellectual tradition to draw ideas from. Through traditions like Midrash or Scholasticism you have learned how to debate real ideas with rigor and logic. You know what justice is, and what justice is not. You understand both the glorious potential of humanity and also have a healthy suspicion of its weaknesses, and you can clearly see this balance of universal human dignity and frailty in the people you interact with in your daily life, and interact with them accordingly. You have models of resistance from Elijah to Daniel in the Lions Den to the Maccabees to Jesus and Martin Luther and the Saints and Martyrs. You have the Psalms and prayer and the reassurance of something higher and an ultimate fulfillment to the universe to give you strength when the secular world is against you. You can say, with Julian, that All Will Be Well.
No wonder so many secular white collar professionals who start to feel rebellions are so anxious. It might be the first time in their lives they have ever dared to rebel. And many have no template for what rebellion looks like, or any higher belief to sustain them through the conflict or give meaning.
I was raised in a devout Lutheran family and converted to Catholicism in college. I graduated from a strong small Catholic college. In my late 20s / early 30s I got a professional degree, went to work for a major institution in NYC, and went through a phase where I was very attached to my career and a little embarrassed about my religious background. I started to go with the intersectional flow and went through a phase where I thought my former faith was "oppressive."
But I have rediscovered it in the last two years. I am so thankful for the foundation that my little midwestern Lutheran sunday school and the Franciscans in Steubenville laid for me now. The belief system I had once thought "oppressive" and "regressive" is now the foundation of an incredible liberty.
My daughters are headed to Catholic School for this very reason next year. And God knows that my own psalter has become very worn out in the last twelve months.