North Carolina Governor’s School Is Miseducating Elite Students

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | December 16, 2024 | David C. Phillips

[karpov]

The North Carolina Governor’s School (GS) was established in 1963. The program was the first of its kind in the nation: a residential summer program for the state’s most academically and artistically gifted high-school students. Over 60 years later, GS has both an East and a West campus, and approximately 800 rising seniors and juniors from across the state arrive each June to spend the next four weeks living in college dormitories, eating in college dining halls, and attending advanced classes in college classrooms.

he resemblance to collegiate life isn’t incidental. The program’s webpage describes GS as “clearly situated between high school and college,” boasting that it “grants students many freedoms associated with university study.” In other words, it is self-consciously a stepping stone for our state’s elite high-school students in their quest to become North Carolina’s—and, indeed, our nation’s—elite university students.

This is why it should be profoundly concerning that GS has lost its way.

I attended the West Campus of GS (Governor’s School West or GSW) in the summer of 1995, and from 2013 to 2021 I was a member of the GSW faculty. I taught English primarily but also, occasionally, a course on “Self and Society.” In those roles, I had the privilege of teaching hundreds of incredibly bright, passionate, and ambitious students. To my great joy, I remained in touch with scores of them, watching as they graduated from high school, entered college, declared majors, earned bachelor’s degrees, pursued graduate studies, and began promising careers. I even had the honor of writing letters of recommendation for a dozen or more along the way.

At the same time, however, the program was becoming increasingly dominated by an ever-narrowing set of acceptable ideas and arguments.

[piytar]

And this is news to whom?! Our “education” system has been a leftist indoctrination system for decades now.

[GOPJ]

The problem wasn’t that students were exposed to these things; it was that they weren’t regularly presented with meaningful alternatives or equipped with the means to question or critique DEI-related assumptions. ...In other words, GSW had become what Jonathan Haidt calls a “tribal moral community”: a social group that coheres around a set of sacred values. A “sacred value,” according to Phil Tetlock, a social psychologist whom Haidt quotes, is “any value that a moral community implicitly or explicitly treats as possessing infinite or transcendental significance” and that therefore cannot be questioned...

In short, crackpot progressive/commie group-think damages students... ummm and the sun comes up in the east.

[SauronOfMordor]

The Governor’s school takes very smart kids from the non-elite, and turns them into reliable servants of elite thought.

The elites are very threatened by the idea of ultra-smart middle class kids competing with their own offspring. Making elite kids smarter is hard — crippling the minds of middle class kids is easier.

[The Great RJ]

Another example of DEI destroying education is the ending of talented and gifted programs and even AP classes in many school districts because they are deemed too elitist and support white privilege. For decades American education has been dumbing down and DEI has made it even worse.