One of the very fanciest, most expensive prep schools in the country recently has been convulsed with demands to alter its curriculum and staff to force feed a radical racial agenda on the children of the Ruling Class.  But a group of parents 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.  

It is notable that the parents backing the letter remain anonymous; such is power of casual accusations of “racism” today. 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, currently at the price of $54,180 a year and certain to rise further every year.

Dana Kennedy of The New York Post writes of the revolt of the elites at The Dalton School in New York City:

The Dalton School

Parents and alumni at the tony Dalton School have fired off a scathing open letter decrying the school’s new race-obsessed agenda.

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.

Maybe you don ‘t care what a few snobby parents at a school with only 1300 students have to say, but these are mostly parents with a lot of influence on the peak institutions of communications and culture. The reality of the cost of the measures demanded  by the racialst know-nothings seeking to degrade education even further is hitting people who thought that their money and status could exempt their kids from the damage inflicted on the rest of us.

It’s a small step, to be sure. But even those parents who didn’t back the letter know that there is truth to their charges that the value of education at the Dalton School is collapsing, if these changes go forward:

The seven-page treatise, signed only “Loving Concern @ Dalton,” calls for a return to empowering “teachers to passionately take responsibility for the children’s education and teach their subject matter in accordance with the Dalton Plan. It seems insane that we have to say this but let’s restore the centrality of education to the school’s mission.

“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 with 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.”

There is an “Emperor’s New Clothes” aspect to what these parents have to say. Children don’t get into an elite school like Dalton unless their parents believe in, and are willing to pay for, the best quality grounding in reason and knowledge for their children. That applies to scholarship students and much as to those whose parents pay full freight.

Only the obsessive radicals among them ignore the peril to their children of putting the race-obsessions of a few ahead of the quality education they sought.

It may be that the threat of being called “racist” will silence these still-anonymous parents. If so, the Dalton School will decline and fall into just another propaganda factory. And with it will go a small backstop against the utter degradation of education in the United States.

Photo credit: Jim.henderson CC BY-SA 4.0  license