Indoctrination, American style
Please consider the The Miseducation of America’s Elites
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.
This Harvard-Westlake parents’ group is one of many organizing quietly around the country to fight what it describes as an ideological movement that has taken over their schools. This story is based on interviews with more than two dozen of these dissenters—teachers, parents, and children—at elite prep schools in two of the bluest states in the country: New York and California.
The parents in the backyard say that for every one of them, there are many more, too afraid to speak up. The atmosphere is making their children anxious, paranoid, and insecure—and closed off from even their close friends. “My son knew I was talking to you and he begged me not to,” another Harvard-Westlake mother told me.
Chapin School
Consider this story, from Chapin, the tony all-girls school on the Upper East Side, involving a white girl in the lower grades who came home one day and told her father: “All people with lighter skin don’t like people with darker skin and are mean to them.” He was horrified as she explained that that was what she had been taught by her teachers. “I said to her: that’s not how we feel in this family.”
It’s worth taking a look at Chapin’s various affinity groups, which have become de rigueur at all of these schools. (Chapin did not respond to a request for comment.)
For high schoolers, the message is more explicit. A Fieldston student says that students are often told “if you are white and male, you are second in line to speak.” This is considered a normal and necessary redistribution of power.
Chapin Affinity Groups and Culture Clubs
I expanded a few of the groups.
Isn’t It Racist to Organize Groups by Race?
And what about The Jewish Affinity Group? Its description is more than a bit bizarre. It’s a group for “Professional Community Members“.
The author of the above article, Bari Weiss writes at bariweiss.substack.com. She is also on the board of advisors of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.
She relates this experience.
I have a friend in New York who is the mother to a four-year-old. She seems exactly the kind of parent these schools would want to attract: a successful entrepreneur, a feminist, and a diehard Manhattanite. She’d dreamed of sending her daughter to a school like Dalton. One day at home, in the midst of the application process, she was drawing with her daughter, who said offhandedly: “I need to draw in my own skin color.” Skin color, she told her mother, is “really important.” She said that’s what she learned in school.
Culture Indoctrination
These allegedly anti-racist schools openly promote race as the be all and end all of fixing what’s wrong.
Anyone who dares speak up is ostracized at best.
Try to Be Less White
In case you missed it, Coca Cola Confirms Training Employees ‘Try To Be Less White’
This is culture indoctrination, American style.
Mish
I’d like to see secondary-high-school child-development science curriculum implemented, which ideally would include some psychology and neurodiversity lessons (albeit not overly complicated). It would be course material, however, considerably more detailed than what’s already covered by the current basic home-economics (etcetera) classes, which typically is diaper changing, baby feeding and so forth.
I believe the latter do not suffice, especially in contemporary times.
General society perceives thus treats human procreative rights as though we’ll somehow, in blind anticipation, be innately inclined to sufficiently understand and appropriately nurture our children’s naturally developing minds and needs. I find that mentality — however widely practiced — wrong and needing re-evaluation, however unlikely that will ever happen.
I wonder how many instances there have been wherein immense long-term suffering by children of dysfunctional rearing might have been prevented had the parent(s) received, as high school students, some crucial parenting or child development education by way of mandatory curriculum? After all, dysfunctional and/or abusive parents, for example, may not have had the chance to be anything else due to their lack of such education and their own dysfunctional/abusive rearing as children.
For decades, I have strongly felt that a psychologically and emotionally sound (as well as a physically healthy) future should be all children’s foremost right—especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter—and therefore child development science should be learned long before the average person has their first child.
All mainstream American schools are like this, full of PC programming about “racism” and environmentalism. And yes, capitalism is considered evil, that’s treated as axiomatic.
As a parent, it is very challenging to avoid this stuff, options are limited.
Quanta is right on this. The eras in which unregulated capitalism has taken over have been the worst for the masses and best for the elites to buy off government.
I went to private school, not by choice. Many years later I still think upper tier public schools are better, the curriculum is at least as good and you don’t have to waste one class every semester on religious studies like I did.
I self-identify as a white male of color.
I love it when white people who control everything in this country whine like little bitches about how everyone is mean to them and nobody likes them. Poor oppressed white people.
Those pesky whites “wining like bitches” as you say, are only 10% of the world’s population and the only race in population decline (creating only 7% of the world’s babies), yet are the most industrious and innovative race the world has known.
Whites unlocked the secrets of DNA and relativity, launched satellites, created automation, discovered electricity and nuclear energy, invented automobiles, aircraft, submarines, radio, television, computers, medicine, telephones, light bulbs, photography, and countless other technological miracles.
Whites were the first to circumnavigate the planet by ship, orbit it by spacecraft, walk on the moon, probe beyond the solar system, climb the highest peaks, reach both poles, exceed the sound barrier, descend to the oceans depths…
Without the chinese none of that would have happened.
Not true. Perhaps you are forgetting the Egyptians and the Greeks?
I don’t think it’s the whites that control everything that are bitching and whining. It’s mostly the ones who control nothing who feel attacked.
The only whiney bitch is you.
Racists are always unhappy with the way the world works. Learn to see beyond skin color and you might find some beautiful people.
There’s an easy solution. Don’t send your kids to those schools. Hopefully the Left is just going through a phase.
Anecdotes only qualify as evidence when they support your own point of view.
we already tried the Neo Liberal way and has failed for last 42 years. We had had the internet bubble; the housing bubble; the failed Covid 19 response in the Uk & the US ( Reaganism & Thatcherism). time is up.
How strange. You push people to vote for the party which encourages this and has made it an integral part of their policies and then complain when they put those same policies in action. Why are you surprised and why would you think that the party in power will change on this.
Ahahahaa..the revenge of elitism.
Minimally paid “safe” teachers teaching that elitism sucks, money isn’t the key to happiness, and that it is necessary to “question authority”.
Because as we all know–bow to your betters, capitalism leads to true happiness, and follow the GOP current version of truth.
The Berlin Wall existed to keep people from getting to capitalist West Berlin. People didn’t try to escape from capitalism to East Germany.
People in Russia have suffered from this kind of brainwashing for 70 years, and see what remains of this…
Anyway, are these schools public schools ? If these parents are wealthy some private schools will emerge with a different kind of teaching.
I doubt the kids are upset. Maybe some parents
“I doubt the kids are upset. Maybe some parents”
Of coarse, the kids are upset.
From the story: The atmosphere is making their children anxious, paranoid, and insecure—and closed off from even their close friends. “My son knew I was talking to you and he begged me not to,” another Harvard-Westlake mother told me.
I agree, from what I’ve seen. Kids find the posturing of adults to be incredibly boring.
Why any outrage about super elite private schools? Kids are going to learn more culture and values from their peers and parents than from classes. Do most of these kids even pay attention in class? The value of these schools is entirely in networking and the alumni networks. And if the parents don’t like the curriculum, send your kids to another school (or, heaven forbid, a public school). Capitalism may fall, but this seems more like the parents want someone else to blame for their kids being lazy (aka not looking to be doctors, lawyers or bankers).
In many areas of the US, public schools are terrible. Mainly large urban centers. I live in the Washington DC area. No politician sends their kids to DC public schools.
You are right. A country where people are chosen mainly with respect to alumni networks, or race, and not on talents, is going to become less and less competitive.
To get into a super-elite university it really helps to go to a super-elite private school that is also woke enough to stay competitive with other woke schools so the parents are caught in a bind. They can’t pull their kids out and they can’t change the curriculum. Complaining in private just shows how weak their position is. Get used to it. That’s how unpopular themes are imposed on people. They speak softly and get hit with a big stick. They just discovered that they are milquetoasts.
I think everyone is racist. And not just people. It extends to all animals and likely plants too.
Parents favor their children. Grand parents favor their grandchildren. Aunts and Uncles favor their nieces and nephews. It’s self evident. If you disagree. Stop reading. You’re too dumb to understand.
The same is true with animals. A mother bear will risk her life for a cub. Why? if the cub died, it would make her life easier. Alligators and birds guard their nests. And so on. It’s because of racism. We’re genetically coded to favor those who are genetically similar to us. The same probably occurs in plants. A tree might steer nutrients towards something grown from her seed. The creatures that weren’t racist, went extinct. They failed to favor their genetics, so their DNA died out.
Racism is bad because someone is being judged by something they can’t control. But, since we’re all coded to be racist, we can’t control being racist either. So accusing someone of being racist is similar to being racist.
I’m not advocating racism. It’s bad. People should try their best not to be racist. But, trying to eliminate it is doomed to fail. Just like outlawing sex would be doomed to failure. We can’t alter our DNA to eliminate the racist gene or gene(s). Better to accept it exists and will always exist, no matter what. Maybe trying to overturn blatant examples is achievable.
Maybe this will end with more and more people thinking that racism is not a pertinent concept, and see other people using this concept as members of some kind of religious sect
Nope, the definition of racism changed. You can only be racist if you are part of the majority.
Sorry, I thought the same as you. Words change, we are dinosaurs.
It’s not really racism. It’s TRIBE security and it goes back to the beginnings of human history.
Talk about a boondogle. And a mismanaged one at that. That’s 15 billion of wasted money that accomplished nothing .
I agree with you completely on this one.
I’ve wondered why steel was chosen. Won’t the entire fence be a rusty eyesore in 10 years?
Pelosi was right. should have gone with high tech surveillance. There was a deal to be had and the solution would have outlasted Trump’s term in office
Is it true that Mexico is building a wall on its south border ?
It was not about limiting immigration. It was about rallying his base to get reelected and in my opinion enriching his friends along the way.
well, you’re 75% right. that 25%? Nope. Mistaken!
Mexico stopped paying for it 😉
In truth, high tech surveillance would have just been shut down anyway so the money would be wasted in either case.
This is a classic example of Republican/Democrats undoing what the other started before it’s finished so that we have lots of unfinished projects, not just this wall. It’s all a massive boondoggle paid for by taxpayers and will be repeated in the future over and over again until taxpayers (voters) demand projects that get started are built to completion even if the administration changes.
My children went to private school in the 80s and early 90s. It cost about $10000/ea and they received a great education. Today, the same school cost about $50000/ea. If one can afford private school and does not like the education they provide it does not cost that much more to hire a private tutor for your child’s education under home schooling rules.
Or join the other parents in starting a private school that truly educates instead of indoctrinates. There is enough objection that divide and conquer won’t succeed.
Barri Weiss resigned by the New York Times complaining about cancel culture. Her views are now championed by Donald Trump jr, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Frankly I read her resignation letter and I suspect there are other issues. She seems to be finding a few trees and thinks she’s identified a forest. Frankly i don’t see it.
Yeah, just make it about Bari Weiss. This is just a few Uber-conservative cranks talking,,,,,nothing to see here folks, just move along.
It is SO much more than Bari Weiss. It has nothing to do with Trump or Marco Rubio.
I dont get the idea of cancel culture. If you don’t like someone or a business for whatever reason you eliminate them from your life. Avoid them/ delete from acct/ don’t shop there etc. if enough people are in the same mind set. It used to be called a boycott. To me it just seems like some sort of republican rallying cry to unite their base.
Cancel culture is about silencing dissent on social media platforms….and also about intolerance of dissenting voices in mainstream media that don’t go along with the postmodernism that is so rampant among young journalists….the NYT is a great case in point.
What is really is….is a form of delusional crowd behavior, that unfortunately is a SYSTEMIC problem with social media in general.
different take
Some of what that cartoon says is correct. Some of it is not.
The landmark court case where a bakery refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple is the example. In other words if you are going to host websites, you can’t decide who you host based on their content unless such content is illegal (child porn for example).
But removing someone from commenting on your own website is certainly well within bounds.
So…the problem here is that this cartoon is not an accurate representation of the reality of cancel culture.
I’m fine with you boycotting, say Bari Weiss, if you don’t like her conservative POV,,,or because you think she’s making shit up out of the whole cloth. Or anybody.
But that isn’t what happened to Bari Weiss….what happened to her is a that a strong cadre of her fellow employees basically ran her off from the NYT because they strongly disagreed with her views. And the NYT knew what her views were when they hired her. When Trump started to fade, she became a liability…..and she didn’t fit in with the NYT writers, who are all young and very woke now. The complained to the editorial staff, who badgered her until she quit.
And it isn’t just Bari Weiss. It’s a lot of people. Some well-respected journalists have been fired because they were merely ACCUSED of being racist, based on some pretty flimsy evidence.
I’m not standiing up for every celebrity who goes on Twitter and says dumb shit, but this is a real thing that hurts people who really just aren’t part of the woke crowd.
When you can’t attack the message… attack the messenger.
No doubt the Left tries to block out some voices, but the right’s been doing this for years too.
This started out as a way to get votes by pandering to various subsets of the voting population. It has morphed into a form of warfare, setting subsets of the population against each other so that the divided population cannot unite against the elite group which rules.
Fight racism with racism
Don’t go there. Problem solved.
Options are limited. The strongly-biased indoctrination is in public and private schools.
I’m an atheist who is about to pull his kids from a private secular school to put them in a private Christian school, and it boils down to my choices being home schooling, Christian schooling, or “woke” schooling. I won’t tolerate the latter.
I’ve been a democrat my whole life. After Trump won in 2016, the democratic party had a stroke and never recovered. The current democratic party is nothing like it was under Clinton or Obama.
Systemic racism is used to cover failed democratic leadership. If you’re a school superintendent of a failed inner city school system, you can either admit you’re a failure at your job or claim the problem is systemic racism. They choose to claim the problems are beyond their control. Systemic racism will insure inner city problems are never solved because their solution is to get rid of something that doesn’t exist.
There are probably more black millionaires in the US than in the entire rest of the world. If you’re born black in the US, your chances of making it in the NBA is probably 10x greater than if you’re born white. 90% of NBA players would not be in the NBA if they weren’t black. You would be hard pressed to find a group of people who benefit more from being black than NBA players. And yet, they’re the biggest complainers of racism. NFL players aren’t far behind.
The republican party is nothing like it was either, even more so.
They haven’t changed as much as the democrats. Not even close.
This has been coming for several years. I got very interested when U. Kansas went off the rails in 2015, and I’ve been studying the phenomenon ever since.
It has its roots in academia, and more specifically in the pseudo social sciences that go by the name of Women’s Studies and African-American Studies…..and Critical Race Theory, which basically says that if black people PERCEIVE that society is racist, then it must BE racist, because the determinant is their “lived experience”.
Objectivity went right out the window, as soon as Women’s Studies was accepted in academia as a legitimate field of study. If you read their “peer reviewed literature” from a perspective of anybody who knows anything at all about the scientific method, it become immediately obvious that none of it has a damn thing to do with any kind of science, social or otherwise.
The worst part is that this a big social movement that is so very similar to some others that have ended up in revolutionary bloodletting on a huge mass scale. The tactics are identical to those of the Chinese Cultural Revolution……many Chinese-Americans of my age or older get this, and articles have been written about it.
At the core it’s an anti-science and anti-intellectual social movement.
But its such an easy sell to liberal-leaning white people. After all, who wants to be a racist?
Nobody.
Sure, there is and always was a lot of racism in America. Nobody I know really denies that. The question is….first, how bad is it, really?…….who is correct on how to handle it?
So now we have this new Emperor….the Vice-President of Inclusion and Diversity. With their bullshit diplomas from bad programs in hand, they craft “programs” to “combat” anti-racism in all its many ugly forms…..
And btw, if you aren’t an anti-racist activists who swallows their “training”, then you’re a racist, and part of the problem.
But the new Emperor has no clothes….the whole farce is built on a foundation of shit. This will eventually be understood.
Trump destroyed both Parties. It was clear that he would do so back in 2016.
Back then, I thought that would be a good thing, but the remnants of those Parties are just filling the power vacuum, weakened as they are. That should have been clear to me too, but it wasn’t. Now we’re stuck with batsh* crazy leaders in Congress no matter how we vote.
What’s with the NBA fixation? We’re talking about a dozen or so guys on what, 30 total teams? That’s less than 400 guys in a nation of 330M people, plus many players come from outside the US.
Sports are a weird thing to complain about because they’re a competition. Whoever plays the best gets to make money in the NBA, NFL, or whatever league. It’s also a much cleaner competition than it is in the corporate world where nepotism is huge.
Oh, and I have no idea why you’re still trying to play the red/blue game. As you know, both parties are terrible so there isn’t much incentive unless you get paid to do it.
And don’t forget the winners of the ghetto lottery, like for instance, Saint Floyd’s family who are now at least $27,000,000 richer. If you are black, you might want to consider sacrificing yourself by getting shot by a cop. It would be for the good of your family.
The problem is that Bari Weiss is not exactly the most credible or impartial source, so I would take all her anonymous inflammatory anecdotes with a heavy grain of salt.
These are private schools. You don’t like it send your kid to a different school.
The inmates have taken over the asylum. People who think all this is just great…..are completely delusional.
This is the chickens coming home to roost on the Democratic Party identity politics platforms that make everybody feel entitled to something…..unless you happen to be white, or worse…..white male.
It has gained ground because social media can move mountains….when some viral video of police malfeasance suddenly gives the impression that racism is some overwhelming problem in policing, when the explanations are actually less simple than simple-minded people can understand….or want to understand.
I have no idea where this will end. I just know it fits hand-in-glove with the general dumbing down of the American people.
There is a broad cultural shift in progress around gender and race. It is considered well-meant, for the most part…..but it’s based on terribly deluded thinking….AND, on power politics out of the late stage communist playbook.
There is a leadership in this movement…..that masquerades as being for social justice, when the real intent is just to shift the power base to a new group of deciders.
Public and private schools are eaten up with political correctness and social justice. I’m sure glad my kids are grown…and that I’m not in a position (for the most part) to have to bow down to this false narrative.
If you are arguing anything other than white men rule the world, you’re just inaccurate. Get over the white fragility. Other races took their medicine, often in the form of slavery and death, now it’s time for privileged whites to think beyond their borders. Do you think being “second in line to speak” is an atrocity against white males?
Thanks for the example of the dumbing down of American people.
“Second in line to speak” is an atrocity against anyone if the color of their skin is the determiner of line placement.
You poor delusional man. Keep drinking the anti-racism kool-aid and see how it all works out.
It’s such a perfect scam…..if I don’t admit to being a racist (and I definitely am NOT…and I have a lifetime of non-racist behavior that proves it)…then I’m automatically an evil old “fragile” white male.
Brilliant!
Here’s the scoop “Rando”….it’s bullshit, and it’s running on the white guilt of people just like you…..who probably have a lot less experience with black people than I do.
I actually know some black people. I have black employees. I have hundreds, maybe thousands, of black patients.
I went to a fully integrated public school where black kids were helped along to try to keep them at grade level. Nobody kept them fromm speaking. They were encouraged to speak.
I have black colleagues, whom I treat with complete respect.
What a total crock.
This is an existential threat to our country. Dividing people by race, the elimination of standards (SATs, MCATs, admissions, hiring, promotions) in favor of ethnic distribution of stepping stones, viewing all interactions as power dynamics playing out, the intensification of different standards of behavior according to race, increasingly attacks on those who believe in universal humanism (“being color blind is racist”) or who have the less desireable skin color, the indoctrination of children instead of raising the US’ mediocre educational outcomes…. This is immoral, unamerican and can become very dangerous.
It goes beyond the elimination of standards. Those running the schools want to do away with math and facts in general. It’s too difficult for non asian minority students to score well on tests, so they want to re-define what the correct answers are. The correct answer will be whatever the majority of test takers write. It will guarantee better scores on tests.
In a few decades you will see the impact of this on the competition with other countries (China for example)
Not a few decades. Right now. I think China has already passed the US as the worlds biggest superpower. We rely on them for almost all our medicine, machine parts, etc… They rely on us for nothing.
Most of these private schools have a board of directors. It would be interesting to know who are on their Boards and who is funding them.
Sounds like a good solution to the problem of racism in our society. It’s my No. 1 concern. Thank goodness these educators recognize the systemic problem and are taking steps to correct it. Kudos to those administrators who have taken on the problem. $40K/yr no great expense to correct the inequities of society.
you are a racist and need to stopped.
You forgot the /S tag at the end of your obvious snark