Moral Panic at Dalton

It seems a lot of parents didn't know about the faculty demands until yesterday. The Naked Dollar has learned that the demands were originally made in August, and have somehow been kept under wraps until now. One imagines today is not a pleasant day to be a Dalton board member. The Head of School has asked parents not to contact teachers until after the break.

One parent tells me that there is zero separation between the board and the school administration. This is not surprising. Most school boards, including colleges, are now wholly owned subsidiaries of their administrations, which are, in turn, controlled by their faculties.

People want their kids to go to schools like Dalton so they can grease the Ivy League skids. Nothing wrong with that, prima facie. Dalton, for its part, needs rich kids to juice the endowment and fund all their wish list items, including diversity outreach. Nothing really wrong with that, either. 

But the rich parents play the game. They go along with every progressive fad conjured up by the administration and faculty. Many embrace them. The 1619 Project, the seventy-two genders, Critical Race Theory...it can be hard to keep up. I'm told that young Dalton kids are made to watch a PBS video called Being 12, wherein white kids are shamed for the sin of their skin color and told they are complicit in perpetuating racism. After watching the video, the white Dalton kids are asked how it "made them feel." 

How do you suppose it made them feel? As a parent, what I'm feeling is pissed off that I'm paying fifty-four grand to have my kid shamed.

A Dalton fourth grade play featured a role for a "Racist Cop." Note that the list of faculty demands insists that every school play have anti-racist narratives. So much for Our Town. I'm told even To Kill a Mockingbird is out these days. It's a white man trying to save a black man. Can't have that sort of racial paternalizing. 

In science, they are learning about "systems." Biological systems, perhaps? Ecological? No, the class features "racism" as a system. The young kids get to learn about mortgage red-lining. In science.

I could go on. This is educational malpractice of the first order.

Parents who don't buy in - and there are many - learn to keep their mouths shut. Nod and smile. Because Yale.

Those who play the game the best - and give the most - wind up on the board. This not only brings major wood to Manhattan cocktail parties - oh, to dangle those recommendation letters - but again, Yale.

So the Dalton board, which has happily gone along for the progressive ride, now finds the train has arrived at Crazy Town. After years of kowtowing to every progressive whim, they are faced with demands that are objectively impossible to meet. But how to say no? That's social suicide. Cancel city. I'm guessing the last time a board like Dalton's said no was sometime in the Pleistocene Era.

One insider I know said this: 

"Dalton is a perfect storm of narcissistic self-importance, ignorance, virtues, and empty Upper East Side values."

Ouch.

But there's one thing the board doesn't understand, something that run-of-the-mill, virtue signaling liberals never understand about revolutionary movements. (And make no mistake, that's what this is.) There is a reason that revolutionary demands are always outrageous and can't be (entirely) met: because the Revolution is the point. Leftist revolutions never, ever, say "mission accomplished" and go home. It's not how they work. If Dalton somehow did agree to everything on the list, the board would find a new list on its doorstep the next day.

To be fair, though, while Dalton is perhaps the most egregious example, what's happening there is happening everywhere. Not just schools, either. All of our institutions. Fear of cancel culture is such that our institutional leaders can't roll over fast enough. Statements of obeisance are made, indulgences paid. Mea culpas made for thought crimes never committed.

When will the culture start pushing back? Will it start with Dalton parents? Doubtful, but who knows?

Later today, this site will post the full faculty letter, because apparently some people think this is being made up, or that it's meant to be satire. It's not.

Stay tuned.