Posted on 03/19/2021 4:30:15 AM PDT by Oshkalaboomboom
Private Schools Have Become Truly Obscene
Elite schools breed entitlement, entrench inequality—and then pretend to be engines of social change.
Dalton is one of the most selective private schools in Manhattan, in part because it knows the answer to an important question: What do hedge-funders want?
They want what no one else has. At Dalton, that means an “archaeologist in residence,” a teaching kitchen, a rooftop greenhouse, and a theater proscenium lovingly restored after it was “destroyed by a previous renovation.”
So it was a misstep when Jim Best, the head of school—relatively new, and with a salary of $700,000—said that Dalton parents couldn’t have something they wanted. The school would not hold in-person classes in the fall. This might have gone over better if the other elite Manhattan schools were doing the same. But Trinity was opening. Ditto the fearsome girls’ schools: Brearley, Nightingale-Bamford, Chapin, Spence.
How long could the Dalton parent—the $54,000-a-kid Dalton parent—watch her children slip behind their co-equals? More to the point, how long could she be expected to open The New York Times and see articles about one of the coronavirus pandemic’s most savage inequalities: that private schools were allowed to open when so many public schools were closed, their students withering in front of computer screens and suffering all manner of neglect?
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Virtue signaling is all that has ever mattered.
Private schools for party loyalists will remain.
For everyone else, it is the public (re) education camps
Maybe they could fix the public schools, instead.
GUM department stores.
Caitlin Flanagan is truly an insane person, as is the Atlantic editor for allowing such insanity to be published.
Oh, Caitlin...
Its jealousy pure and simple.
Caitlin Flanagan, FU.
The elites can still send their children to boarding schools in, in, hmmmmm, Russia, and China?
Exodus 20:17
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.
Anybody can get their kid a vastly superior education to public school - and for free. But you have to want it.
Khanacademy.org is one way. But there are many others.
Many of the elite private schools are as infected with the “woke” social justice nonsense as the public schools.
Here is a recent news article on Dalton and an “anti-racist” manifesto created by its teachers:https://www.foxnews.com/us/teachers-at-posh-nyc-school-release-8-page-anti-racism-manifesto-sparks-uproar-report
Sadly, even Catholic schools, which are generally much more affordable, are being infected. The old school nuns with the rulers are retiring and being replaced by liberation theology wing nuts.
Part of her complaint is that private schools don’t pay taxes on “income” from tuition and donations. She doesn’t realize that the money was already taxed when earned by the payer.
Envy is poisonous.
If you read the article (!) you'll find its pretty much spot-on. Here's one example:
But what makes these schools truly ludicrous is their recent insistence that they are engines of equity and even “inclusivity.” A $50,000-a-year school can’t be anything but a very expensive consumer product for the rich. If these schools really care about equity, all they need to do is get a chain and a padlock and close up shop.
That could have been posted by anyone on FR and gotten kudos. The writer actually has a decent sense of humor:
These are fundraising events dedicated to financing a major school project: paving the locker rooms with gold coins, annexing Slovakia, putting out a hit on a rival headmaster.
Finally, there is the soft racism that comes with elite private schools...
the expectation that Black kids would be excellent athletes (and possibly weaker students); insulting assumptions about Black students’ family backgrounds; teachers repeatedly confusing the names of Black students; other students constantly reaching out and touching Black girls’ hair; and non-Black students using the N‑word.
...and the crux of the article, in an Instagram post ...
our kids are being taught terrible values: that hypocrisy and dishonesty are fine so long as you virtue-signal the right fashionable politics. And that those fashionable politics are basically meaningless—they are just for show, a way to make being privileged and wealthy truly guilt-free.
The Atlantic is an odd publication: it stumbles around in the leftist fog of wokism, elitism, and every other ism that stands against classical liberalism and good taste. But once in a while, a subversive mildly traditionalist piece gets published.
In a way, the same hope accompanying such a piece's publication is what propels Deplorables in the darkness of the Biden presidency*.
My children all went to “Blue Ribbon” Catholic schools since birth at a tremendous personal financial sacrifice.
The public schools in my area are excellent however just academic education is just a part of raising a child. The moral and ethical component is critical as well.
The public schools were lacking in this area.
Of course, your children can go to public school and as parents deliver this component as well (which we always reinforced at home) but the battle is more difficult.
Leading by example at home is the first step...
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