Another brave teacher stands up to Critical Race Theory
I am a teacher at Grace Church High School in Manhattan…
As a teacher, my first obligation is to my students. But right now, my school is asking me to embrace “antiracism” training and pedagogy that I believe is deeply harmful to them and to any person who seeks to nurture the virtues of curiosity, empathy and understanding…
I know that by attaching my name to this I’m risking not only my current job but my career as an educator, since most schools, both public and private, are now captive to this backward ideology. But witnessing the harmful impact it has on children, I can’t stay silent.
Much much more at the link.
People such as Paul Rossi, the author of the piece, are in a position somewhat analogous to the situation of dissidents during the later stages of the USSR. Unlike earlier Soviet dissidents, they don’t risk being sent to an actual gulag or killed outright; not at this point, anyway. But they are at risk for loss of livelihood and ostracism if they speak out against the official prevailing wokeness. These are not small things.
I salute all those who demonstrate such courage.
When I do a Google search for “Paul Rossi Grace Church School” right now, all I get (besides the school website) are news sources on the right such as Fox and the NY Post and The Federalist, and once again the British Daily Mail. That’s a very familiar pattern. The story is also on Bari Weiss’ Twitter page. I imagine there’s quite a bit going on behind-the-scenes right now at the school, however.
It does indeed require great courage to speak out against the baleful unreason of the totalitarian “wokerati” who are in the process of destroying public education, just as it does to criticize the tyranny of the “wokesters” in corporate HR departments, in the Pentagon and elsewhere in our nation gone completely mad. Until the power of the malign teachers’ unions is broken, and until colleges and universities are severely defunded (unlikely, unfortunately, to occur until a time of porcine aviation), this cancer will without question continue to metastasize until the body politic can no longer be healed.
Again, I want to draw attention to this article. Please note who is funding this crap. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Gliechshaltung
What’s interesting to me is that the headmaster implementing this travesty (which included a letter of reprimand of this teacher which had to be read in every classroom) is 63 years old and has been in the headmaster’s chair for 27 years. Someone in that age range shouldn’t be responsive to fads. So, just how long has this man been surreptitiously planning this?
Art+Deco:
How do you think he got where he is now? By appearing to be acceptably and comfortably ‘Ahead of the Curve’ (God, how I hate Bugpeople Cant!) and leading the way or through years of dedicated quiet dedicated service with eyes fixed on the constant lodestar of truth?
Not everyone at the top is a sociopath, but there are dis-proportionally more sociopaths at the top of organisations because high functioning sociopathy is a competitive advantage in society as currently constituted.
All credit to this man for sticking his neck out. And I hope that he will prosper in his new career.
You know what’s wrong with that essay? It doesn’t offer one bit of insight into where this racialist mindset came from or how it became so dominant within the school. Did a super-villain use his Mesmer-Ray on school staff and administrators?
Mike
Mindset must have flown in from flyover country. It is truly a mystery.
You know what’s wrong with that essay? It doesn’t offer one bit of insight into where this racialist mindset came from or how it became so dominant within the school.
That would be helpful to know. The blogger Naked Dollar has some insights on matters at the Dalton School, but his account is quite incomplete.
One of the places I frequent offered his account of the corporate world as he’d experienced in the latter part of his career (he’s an attorney recently retired from a GC’s office). He said the ‘C-suite’ people weren’t paying much attention to the legal department, who were certainly not driving the woke foolishness at his company. He said it was coming from HR and corporate communications, who had somehow persuaded the C-suite people that above all they must not anger various and sundry Alinskyite pressure groups. I do wonder if the dynamics of competition in institutional life has led to senior executive positions being occupied uniformly by hollow men.
Faculty members as I’ve known them tend to be other-directed people who seldom say anything even in private conversation that surprises you. Asininities are maintained because they delineate in-groups and out-groups. No clue about secondary school teachers. It makes them vulnerable to fads.
Steven Sailer and John Derbyshire have offered the hypothesis that much of the professional-managerial class is suffering cognitive dissonance over race matters, and instead of adjusting their priors, they’re just getting crazier and nastier. If Sailer’s correct, one might posit that the rest of us aren’t suffering because the comparative performance of coarse categories of humanity is for us a sociological curio that’s of academic interest unless there’s some clear and convincing evidence of mistreatment of one category or another. And, not suffering, we’re baffled by all of this.
One thing about private school settings I’d note is that you have common-and-garden bourgeois paid ordinary salaries to teach the children of professional-managerial people and the children of patricians. Since I’ve seen it in tertiary institutions (where it’s pervasive, though, in my time, not all that severe), I cannot help but suspect that the mode among the teachers is to despise the bulk of their students and the bulk of their parents.
First, kudos to Mr. Rossi. He deserves praise for risking his career to stick up for his students.
Now, on to the unfortunate reality. Statistically speaking we live in a nation of (explitive – explitive) cowards! I just did 1 minute of searching and some quick math. We’ll ignore K – 8 teachers.
There are about 1.5 million people employed teaching college courses (that excludes graduate students acting as T.A.s). There are about 3.5 million people employed teaching K – 12. Let’s estimate 1/3 of those teach High School; 1.1 million. Add that to the 1.5 million teaching College and that makes 2.6 million of our fellow citizens being paid to educate, inform and build character in our young adult population.
Why do we hear of teachers like Paul Rossi, Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, Lindsay Shepherd (a mere T.A.), Amy Waxman? Because they are so (explitive) rare! There are the three people who submitted the feminist dog rape papers, some folks on Quillette, I think I remember some University of Chicago professors signing something regarding free speech.
That’s it. In a profession of over two and a half million people who supposedly dedicate their lives to imparting truth and wisdom and instructing others how to courageously search for truth we’ve got what? 100 speaking out against racism, misogyny, segregation, data falsification, and misappropriation of funds? Let’s assume I’ve forgotten some stories and missed some brave truth tellers and erred by a factor of 10 and there are actually 1,000 amazing, wonderful educators in our country who have courageously spoken out against this madness in an attempt to try to save their students. 1 out of every 2,500?! 4 hundredths of a percent!
Look, I can see if you’re an accountant 5 years from retirement and your corporation is going woke and you decide to keep your head down and your mouth shut and hope to last until you get your pension. You didn’t get into your profession to shape young minds or build character. You didn’t dedicate your life to testing hypotheses.
But of the over two million people in our nation who claim to do that for a living less than 1,000 are wiling to call out the false data and lies they see directly in front of them?! Lies that they know will harm their students! Not only that, but they are willing to mouth the lies and speak untruths simply to hold onto their positions. (explitive-explitive) pathetic! What a bunch of gutless pretenders.
Sad.
They are unworthy of the legacy of Socrates, Plato, Galileo, Dr. King, Madame Curie, Albert Einstein, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Alfred Wegener, Charles Darwin…
Look, I get that not everyone has the strength to do difficult things, but not even 10% can do what is right? How do they look at themselves in the mirror? How do they cash their paychecks? What a mass of spineless, pitiful hypocrites.
I agree that this is coming from HR in corporations. Where do you think the Gender Studies people end up?
Where do they end up? In HR pouring over the social media content of current and potential employees for wrongthink. Revenge of the mean girls and soy-boys.
@Rufus:
Comrade… Comrade… Didn’t you get the Memo that Solzhenitsyn is an Unperson post his lamentably deplorable Harvard Commencement Address? Also there’s the small matter of his mysteriously unpublished in English translation Two Hundred Years Together. Very problematic! Tsk Tsk. Still, I hear it’s very pleasant in Sakhalin or Gary IN. I’m sure you’ll find growth opportunities in your new assignment!
“Steven Sailer and John Derbyshire have offered the hypothesis that much of the professional-managerial class is suffering cognitive dissonance over race matters”
There’s probably a lot to that. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was over half a century ago, which means children born AFTER it became are now old enough to have adult children of their own. So, America’s overwhelmingly white professional class is now facing the rise of a generation of college-educated minorities who grew up never experiencing the kind of segregation and violent discrimination of their parents but carrying, in the white professional world, the same kind of moral authority.
Mike
Neo,
Look up the recent VivaFrei review of the Uni of Va. Med School expulsion of a student who too persistently engaged a professor on the definition of “micro-aggressions”
As an outraged Frei exclaimed, “If they can’t get you on substance they will do it on process!!!”.
It’s both the hallmark of a morally corrupt system inhabited by verminous two-bit disciples of Krylenko and Vyshinski, and the current state of the Federal justice system and progressive America as a whole.
You don’t have to commit a crime. They will manufacture one and assign it to you. “Failure to denounce”, for an historical example, is from the Stalinist period of the Soviet Union.
American liberals using the same theory and tactic describe it as, “Silence is Violence”.
Rufus, Your percentage is a bit low, but not by much. When I retired 2 years ago I knew of about 10 faculty who were conservative, moderate, or classic liberal; the rest raving leftists. That out of a total of about 140. Sad part is that 20 years prior the number was closer to 120.
zaphod,
I had to search “Sakhalin.” I guess I’d pick Gary? At least Gary produced the Jackson 5.
physicguy,
Sorry if my comment wasn’t clear (I was raving and typing a bit fast). It has nothing to do with how teachers may vote, or where they come down on politics. Truth is truth. Research is research. Education is education.
No matter what an educator hopes the conclusion is, one would assume the vast majority, 90% or more, would want education to remain completely free and open to consider any hypothesis. They would want to drill rigor and discipline into their charges. They would insist that speech is free in their classrooms. They would welcome debate and discussion.
Yet 99.9% of educators sit idly by and say nothing when their institutions censor, lie, segregate and falsely accuse. The Duke LaCrosse abomination should have resulted in a mass of educators demanding due process in all future cases involving students. When race hoaxers are discovered faculty should insist they be suspended for at least a semester for bringing dishonor and disgrace to the school.
Where are the instructors insisting that academic rigor be maintained and respected?
“Zaphod on April 14, 2021 at 7:19 pm said:
Also there’s the small matter of his mysteriously unpublished in English translation Two Hundred Years Together. “
Solzhenitsyn had no motive to diminish Russian responsibility for Russian communism, no, not at all.
And nor did he. History isn’t black or white and nobody gets to be airbrushed out of history when it’s inconvenient to remember them. Except Yezhov 😛
This is the second piece of this type Bari Weiss has posted this week. I read both and the ‘oh so thoughtful and concerned’ comments as well.
These people have no idea what they are up against.
Which is odd, considering they are educated and presumably aware of the historical precedents.
If it weren’t for the 2A they’d be in danger of losing a lot more than their jobs.
I wonder if they’ve figured that out yet.
Art Deco —
I am not surprised that HR is driving this foolishness in industry and corporate America. HR are social workers gone corporate. Social workers are (mostly) well-making people who jump on the latest fad to repair the world. HR professionals are (mostly) well-meaning people who jump on the latest fad to repair their employees or employers — it could go either way — but at a decent salary.
Molly Brown —
They don’t know what they’re up against because they still think that conservatives are the bad guys — the racist, homophobic, phobic-crazy, gun-toting maniacs — and the left, the “liberals,” the Democrats are the “good guys.”
They’re on the cusp of the red pill moment. They just haven’t taken it yet.
Episcopal church and school. They quit believing in Jesus a generation or more ago. So…no surprise there.
Flip Wilson’s Church of What’s Happening Now has nothing on them.
“Where are the instructors insisting that academic rigor be maintained and respected?”
Rufus, we are actually making the same point. As the leftists have taken over the academy, they also have insisted that such academic rigor is RACIST!, and as such must be eliminated. So, for the last 10 years or so, rigor has been scaled back from exam questions to standards for academic journals.
The classic liberal faculty I once knew may have been left of center in their politics but were firmly on the side of academic rigor. Case in point: the recent push that getting the right answer in any mathematics problems is racist. What really is new is that this has now exploded into the main culture. I heard that argument 12 years ago in a faculty meeting where the physics department was accused of racism because we didn’t teach alternative “physics” from POCs which was non-mathematical, non-observational based. Of course, since our racist physics is in part constructed from dead white guys, it must be racist; Yukawa, Bose, etc. notwithstanding.
@Physicsguy:
Pointing out the successes in the hard sciences of Japanese and Bengali Kayasthas (one of the highest castes) is only going to hurt feelings in the African Studies Department who can sense if only vaguely that this might interfere with their fever-brained assertions that Whipeepo have their boot heels on the heads of all other races keeping them down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_Kayastha
Social workers are (mostly) well-making people who jump on the latest fad to repair the world.
I don’t think most of them are well-meaning.
I get the feeling that social work and journalism both have similar problems. Both overwhelmingly attract people of a progressive ideological bent. Then, if they actually chew up boot leather and actually *do* their purported jobs they encounter so much human depravity, dysfunction, misery, corruption, etc. that it drives them either into extreme cynicism or ideological fanaticism or some combination of both.
The world of human beings and doings doesn’t bear too much close examination and absent religion, is only really bearable with recourse to a great deal of ersatz religion == wokeism.
Beyond that, all of us here are familiar with the notion that Well Meaning People are the really scary ones.
Art Deco…”What’s interesting to me is that the headmaster implementing this travesty (which included a letter of reprimand of this teacher which had to be read in every classroom) is 63 years old and has been in the headmaster’s chair for 27 years. Someone in that age range shouldn’t be responsive to fads.”
Fad-following has always existed, of course, and seems to have increased in recent decades. The late Prince Philip observed, in the early 1980s, that:
“Fashion is not restricted to clothes, and when ideas become fashionable they are just as resistant to objective criticis as the length of skirts.”
The phenomenon seems to have gone hyper-exponential in recent years, though. My LinkedIn feed is cluttered with posts from people who are trying to demonstrated their familiarity & alignment with the current coolnesss, whether business or social or political.
*awakens from slumbers and pricks up ears*
Eh? Eh? Did I just hear “Repair the World”?
*reaches for Browning*
(Exit, Pursued by a Bear.)
Rufus:
“…would want education to remain completely free and open to consider any hypothesis…”
Props for using ‘hypothesis’, rather than misusing ‘theory’.
Solzhenitsyn had no motive to diminish Russian responsibility for Russian communism, no, not at all.
Russian nationalists contend that the elite ranks of the Communist Party and the government in the initial years of the Soviet regime were disproportionately drawn from minorities. (I think the same point has been made in re the Communist regime in Roumania). The premier was typically an ethnic Russian (1917-24 and 1930-41 excepted). As for the position of party boss, Lenin was an ethnic jumble, Stalin was Georgian, and the other occupants either Ukrainian or on the spectrum between Great Russian and Ukrainian.
That’s a pretty wide old mighty vaguely under-specified spectrum yer got there. Could drive a Soviet tank division right through it and not scrape the sides. Come to think of it…
A bit later, but this photo never fails to elicit a chuckle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German–Soviet_military_parade_in_Brest-Litovsk#/media/File:Armia_Czerwona,_Wehrmacht_22.09.1939_wspólna_parada.jpg
Zaphod @ 8:27am,
Not sure where Malawi fits in with your obsession regarding people’s ancestral origins preordaining their abilities, but I think you’d enjoy the book, “The Boy who Harnessed the Wind” William Kamkwamba is an impressive young man and neither Japanese nor Benghali.
@Rufus:
Look up President Hastings Banda. Paul Theroux had a notorious run in with him back in the day. Frankly I find Banda a more sympathetic character than Theroux. However his efforts to found an African Eton and instruct his countrymen in Latin and Greek was rather Quixotic.
“ William Kamkwamba” – not bad. However the exception does not prove the rule. What is population of SSA? Roughly 1 Billion in 2020. I’d expect to be inundated with TED-talking rough-hewn prodigies I sense an absence.
Comic Evan Sayet argues in his recent book that we face a Woke Supremacy. And just like with other Supremacist ideologies — Islamism and Marxism, still au current — it cannot be stopped without resorting to force.
“HR are social workers gone corporate.“
As I get older, I focus more on structural issues. For example, social media use probably has more to do with the current state of things than any Leftist ideology.
Similarly, the problem with HR is structural. I’ve been in corporate environments and there are moments when HR departments are VERY useful, but those moments are few and far between. If HR just focused on HR, they’d have next to nothing to do 50-75% of the time.
That’s not the recipe for a financially rewarding career. The result is a class of corporate employee with lots of free time and an incentive to “find” problems only they can solve.
Mike
If HR just focused on HR, they’d have next to nothing to do 50-75% of the time.
Then cut their staff by 50-75%. A great deal of this just seems to derive from witless negligence on the part of company presidents.
}}} These are not small things.
This is the ACTUAL meaning of “Speaking Truth To Power“.
Not when you badmouth Trump in an Oscar reception speech or doing the monologue on The Tonight Show.
Structural issues – Why do companies plow money (overhead costs) into HR? To minimize risk from lawfare? Not that leftist ideology has anything to do with the law and “justice” or where laws originate. It is another profound mystery.
“Why do companies plow money (overhead costs) into HR?”
Because HR actually does serve a very useful purpose, especially in large corporations, but that purpose is fairly narrow. Once that HR department is established, however, it becomes a money/power suck for the reasons I outlined earlier.
And just in case there’s anyone else who, LIKE YOU, doesn’t understand what the “structural” means in this context…
There’s no inherent reason why HR should attract individuals of any particular ideology or political bent. HR staffers could be Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal. The point is that they’re in a situation where certain behavior/actions are incentivized and, as I’m sure social scientists could explain, attitudes can follow actions as surely as the other way around.
Mike
Bunge – big words – structural, foundational, essential, undergirding, oh, I don’t understand context? There is no reason? Because, Bunge.
“Certain interactions,” those would be due to policies, regulations, and corporate “culture” that are influenced by “ideology?” Ok, Bunge ‘splain it all as is your proclivity.
Found your caps key again. How quaint. LOL
Dude, put down the pipe and apply more ointment to your butt.
I mean, you DO realize how ridiculous you look…right?
Mike
Bunge:
Some advice, stop projecting your problems onto others. Your psychosexual hangups are best kept to yourself, or shared with your therapist. TMI sonny.