Is a ToS violation deemed to occur when a complaint is made? I ask this because I can’t help noticing that the three flaggings on this thread were meted out to postings made in response to a particular commenter. Those comments were at least as robust as the postings in response. As you know we on the Chicago board like robustness. Most commenters understand this. It’s a characteristic of the school, love it or hate it, and it’s useful information for any incoming or prospective student to have.
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No. Just because a post is flagged does not mean the moderator agrees.
To be clear on concept, having a different opinion does not violate ToS, and will not be the reason a post is hidden or deleted.
Unfortunately for tens of millions of kids educated in the South the answer is ‘Yes.’ A “manual created in the heart of the South during the height of the Jim Crow era” shaped education in the South for much of last century, and it still impacts what is being taught today. The propaganda also seeped into the textbooks in the North and into popular culture nationwide, and a shocking number still mistake these myths for truth.
In short, Your notion that CRT is polluting the purity of US History curriculums falls on its false assumption that the current narrative is anywhere near accurate and complete. As you said, “ideas have consequences” and these ideas have had far reaching and pernicious consequences. (I thought the quote was apt given Weaver’s more sophisticated and subtle penchant for idealizing and romanticizing the feudal, agrarian South.).
As for HW, I was not “part of the action in that fight” except as an interested observer. I don’t have animus toward these parent for their concerns. I understand why, instinctually, some of what they are witnessing just feels wrong to them. It is a challenging transition. Any “animus” is for those appealing to the most “destructive, faddish, and hypocritical” elements of the culture wars to try to get their way. The kids and the community deserve better.
This isn’t true. This is an inappropriate and inadequate forum to get into the weeds of the policies and claims, but I strongly disagree with their descriptions of the content of the “new” curriculum and policies.
It has already been decided by the “adults who pay the bills.” The only remaining question is whether the detractors will be able to muster enough “faddish” political outrage from outside the community to pressure the school into reversing course.
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Not exactly. Those with children already in Harvard-Westlake entered with a different understanding of what the environment was going to be like. The ground rules shifted, but there are high switching costs. So far the head of H-W seems to surviving better than Dalton’s Jim Best, but this story is not fully written. You won’t know the full impact until new families and existing wealthy alumni decide whether or not this is a worthwhile change.
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Thanks for the not so veiled accusation, but I didn’t flag the posts.
(I was wondering if I could have hit a wrong button, so I just flagged one of my own posts to see if a 2nd level confirmation was required. It apparently isn’t, but I think I’d remember the popup.). I guess we will see if my post disappears.
This isn’t accurate. The changes haven’t been sudden, unplanned or unexpected, and the mission was officially redefined before any current students (including this year’s class) had enrolled in the school.
Let’s move from the OT discussion of flagged posts. Mike posted a detailed explanation here, which is where questions on the topic are better posted. If a user who had their post flagged on this thread has questions as to why their post was flagged, they can PM me, but for privacy reasons, I will not discuss why another user’s post was flagged.
That’s because July 2020, the date that the Anti-Racism mission was presented, was technically prior to the start of the new school year. But it was certainly after this year’s class committed and prepared to matriculate (if not already enrolled).
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My daughter applied to HW for the class of 2021. We had absolutely no idea that this was the culture of the school when she applied. It was never articulated during the tours, info sessions or during the student or parent interviews. Maybe we were just naive, but I don’t think we were the only ones. Schools should absolutely be clear and upfront about this. It would help parents make informed decisions. My younger child currently attends an independent school in Los Angeles and we were completely unaware that this ideology had overtaken the curriculum until we saw it for ourselves during distance learning.
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@mtmind , there you go again. The choice you give us excludes anything like a balanced account of our history. Why must we choose as between a text that cycles segregation-era tropes of southern provenance and one that makes racism the central thing about us? A close reading of the HW program makes clear what it intends to give its students, and not simply in its history classes. You favor this, just as the dissident parents deplore it. That’s why I don’t see much difference in the underlying reality described by both of you. You tell us it’s a choice between anti-racism and Jim Crow. That’s more than a false choice - it’s a canard. Why are you so focused on old southern textbooks anyhow - unless they make a convenient straw man.
That’s a nasty smear of Richard Weaver. It comes from the CRT playbook: If you don’t like someone, call him a racist. It’s the surest way to destroy him and avoid dealing with his thought. Weaver was a white southerner. Was that his offence? However, the ideas referenced in his once famous book were unrelated to race. His bete noire was Marx, and the consequences he deplored were those of Marxism - show trials, struggle sessions, gulags, the various paraphernalia of thought control that he believed must inevitably accompany an ideology of class warfare. As Stalin said, only two words have any meaning: “Who-Whom.” All you need to know in our world is who is subject and who is object, who the hammer, who the nail. CRT has certainly picked up that perspective. It doesn’t make Weaver a racist that he deplored such thinking long before the Marxists got around to applying it to race. His preoccupations might sound quaint were it not for the echoes of his fears in these CRT-inspired classrooms and seminars. He would have opposed the compulsion, falseness, and one-dimensionality of all this, and, yes, he would probably be called a racist for that very reason.
@BeagleBrigade provides interesting testimony suggesting that HW might be speaking out of both sides of its mouth. However, a close reading of that manifesto linked in the Weiss piece should do wonders to lift the scales from the eyes of any uninformed parent.
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The school’s “Mission Statement” was adopted before the this year’s Senior Class enrolled (or applied) back in 2014. So the Mission Statement was in place before every single student, 7th through 12th grade enrolled. And the “Mission Statement” hasn’t changed.
The 2020 anti-racism plan was created pursuant to Mission Statement, but it it’s genesis goes back to at least 2016.
You mean this year? Or back in 2014 when the Class of 21 started 7th grade?
Either way, the Mission was the same, and was (and is) featured prominently on the website and in much of the literature about the school, and in information sessions, and it is a recurring them in the annual state of the school talk. Not sure about now, but past applications have even featured in the questions about the Mission Statement. The school and administrators refer to the Mission Statement so much the it has become the subject of friendly teasing. It is hard to imagine that anyone would apply to HW without multiple exposures to the Mission Statement.
That said, like with colleges, sometimes prospective students get so caught up with the reputation and prestige of a place, that they overlook potential “fit” issues.
Here it is again, with my emphasis. : HW strives to be a diverse and inclusive community united by the joyful pursuit of educational excellence, living and learning with integrity and purpose beyond ourselves.
As for the culture of the school, it isn’t fairly or accurately represented by the anonymous site supposedly documenting it’s demise. I won’t get into the details, because this is not an appropriate forum, but you would be better off talking to people who attend, that trusting that site.
Striving to be a diverse and inclusive community isn’t quite the same thing as redesigning the US History curriculum or requiring middle school reading on anti-racism or mandatory anti-racism training. A school can be a diverse and inclusive community without those or other things that families find disturbing. And HW was probably diverse and inclusive prior to 2014, when they articulated the mission statement. Were these parental concerns cropping up in 2014?
There is also the issue of what sort of diversity the school has been striving for - pigment, or something a bit more transcendent.
@BeagleBrigade - I’m not a bit surprised that schools aren’t being forthcoming with this stuff when prospective families tour. They need to be. If there is an “anti-racism” initiative under development, that information should be shared with new families so that they understand the sort of education their children would receive if admitted.
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A person would read that and think that H-W aspires to ideals of Martin Luther King, who asked that people be judged for the content of their character and not the color of their skin.
In practice, CRT sounds closer to McCarthyism where guilt is assumed unless vociferously denied in public.
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To answer your question about why I referenced the origins of the Lost Cause myth . . . You claimed that CRT was replacing historical analysis with narrative. This is inaccurate. CRT critically analyzes history, exposing and replacing false narratives and augmenting incomplete narratives. The ongoing prevalence and acceptance of the myth of the “Lost Cause” (a phrase Weaver was fond of, by the way) is one such example of one such narrative, because while the “Lost Cause” myth may have originated in the Jim Crow era, it is is alive and well, and widely believed today.
Also, given your scorn for even the suggestion of and institutional racism, I figured I’d provide you a real world example. Tens of millions of southerners were taught the “Lost Cause” mythology in southern schools. Again, those ideas have consequences.
I didn’t call Richard Weaver a racist, and my comments had nothing to do with the fact that he was a “white southerner.” Apparently, I mistakenly assumed that, since you alluded to him, you would be familiar with Weaver’s essays on the South and his posthumously published dissertation, The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought. In these works Weaver is unabashed in his romanticization and idolization of feudal, agrarian South, which is all I said.
As for the rest, you have now repeatedly accused me of following some sort of CRT playbook. (If there is one I don’t have it and if I did it would probably be pretty useless as I am by no means a CRT scholar.) You also compare an attempt at education reform aimed at diversity and inclusiveness to Stalinism. And now you call the school’s plan a “manifesto” and you continue to draw conclusions about the school for which you have no basis in fact or experience.
In short, this is going nowhere, so I’ll thank you for your time and bow out now, as we seem to be moments away from realizing Godwin’s law.
Good Luck.
I am not sure what I think about CRT. In concept, fine. In application there is potential for abuse.
What I have seen as valuable since the George Floyd murder is the student and alumni holding a mirror up to the administration and teachers and forcing them to see that they aren’t as anti-racist as they fancy themselves. That conversation has been productive, but the work is far from over. It is just starting.
What worries me is when that process crosses over to “if you question our statements you are racist”. That is happening in high schools and colleges across the country. It is one thing for people who have always gotten to define the curriculum to be uncomfortable when the curriculum changes to include a POV that is not their own. That is part if the point - welcome to the world most people live in. But stifling dissent is another thing entirely.
@mtmind, I may be wrong (and if I am, correct me), I think you are saying dissent is not being stifled at HW. I hope that is true. But it appears that there are parents and students who have perceived the stifling of opinions, and the response of the school administration is to dismiss those opinions as irrelevant. Is that assessment wrong? Are the opinions not being dismissed? Are people not feeling dismissed? I doubt that making people feel dismissed is a goal of CRT per se, and I don’t think it is consistent with the HW mission, either.
I cringe at the argument “It’s _________, love it or leave it” which is the message the “dissidents” seem to be receiving. If so, that message is very hypocritical. It is a doctrine of exclusion.
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I will admit that I had not read or heard of Weaver’s posthumous dissertation. I knew he was a southerner, and it does not surprise me that he was influenced by the Agrarian Movement, a once influential counterpoint to the Marxist writers of mid-century. The thesis of the principals in that group, the so-called “Fugitives”, is not concerned with race but rather a world that has lost its bearings in the rootlessness of commerce and urban alienation. Marxism is viewed as a manifestation of that spirit. No doubt Weaver, whose mature books concern the latter subject, was influenced by this critique. Nothing is ever lost in a life.
Lately the pendulum of intellectual fashion has swung hard against the agrarians, and they are routinely stigmatized as racists. They are forgotten figures in any event. As is Weaver. My hat has to be at least halfway off to you for even recognizing the allusion to his principal book, not to mention your having read his minor works, which is more than I can say of myself. It sounds, however, like he didn’t take with you. So it goes. Education teaches us to read voluminously but critically. Some of Weaver is good, some not so good.
Reform isn’t a bad thing in my book, but it is CRT, not I, that repudiates any idea that our irremediably white supremacist culture can be reformed. Your account sounds benign and even bland, but the ideology itself is something else. You are not very interested in digging into either its theoretical underpinnings, which you say you don’t know much about, or its practical implementation in the forms we keep reading about. If in fact it is as joyful and free from coersion as you say it is, I myself could probably accept it. In HW’s own account of its mission it hardly seems to be that. I am myself a moderately liberal person and very open to all programs of social and racial amelioration. The HW statement, which explicitly links itself to CRT, is far from that. To say, as you do, that resistance to it is just a matter of people being uncomfortable with what they are unaccustomed to simply begs the question of whether the plan itself is good and desirable or the contrary. It is the right and duty of all of us to oppose falsehood as we are given to see it.
You are right, I am watching all this from afar. But I’m an interested observer, one who is far from convinced that the battle has been won or deserves to be won by this radical ideology.
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Exactly this. Back in 2014 our family never could have imagined that a “diverse and inclusive community” would look the way HW looks today. I’m not basing this opinion on the instagram accounts, I know several students who currently attend.
It’s actually just “guilt is assumed.” For example, if you support any system that can predict outcomes by race (“policing” being one very public example but education is up there as well) then you are a racist. Most are racist w/o realizing it. On the other hand, “anti-racism” supports ways to equalize all outcomes so that they can’t be predicted by race and requires constant effort and re-education.
So what’s next for your children? Do they stay in these private schools given they are already there? And given what you know now, would you have done something differently?
CRT suffered a credibility setback on both the factual and critical analysis fronts with the 1619 Project. Furthermore, the NYT has been disingenuous (at best) about the intent of the project w/r/t high school curricula, because despite assertions that the materials are intended to be ‘supplemental,’ the purpose of the 1619 Project is to re-frame US History as a country originated in order to keep and protect the institution of slavery. Such a re-framing is needed to get people to buy-in to the idea of systemic racism and start overturning the current system so that outcomes are more equal for those of color.
Nikole Hannah-Jones’s own work “The 1619 Project” is the example par excellence of the “critical analysis” methods of CRT. She uses fiction, poems and essays to educate students in this new understanding of this country’s origins. Now, typically in a history or humanities class, the students would be asked to analyze the author’s message using methods of critical inquiry applied to an original source. But that’s the ‘old way’ (or, in the graphic I reference upthread, a way reliant upon “white” analytical methods). The CRT way starts with this fundamental “fact”: the colonies revolted against Great Britain, and the United States was founded, in order to protect slavery. To question that would be to argue that 2+2 does not equal 4. Any “analysis” must build upon this fundamental “fact” and will rely mostly on personal experience vis -a-vis what the author is saying. In other words, @marlowe1 is correct: CRT replaces historical analysis with narrative. It must. Because it gets the facts wrong to begin with.
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