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| -Short Attention Span Theater- | |
| The Miseducation of America’s Elites | |
| 2021-03-11 | |
| [CityJournal] The dissidents use pseudonyms and turn off their videos when they meet for clandestine Zoom calls. They are usually coordinating soccer practices and carpools, but now they come together to strategize. They say that they could face profound repercussions if anyone knew they were talking. But the situation of late has become too egregious for emails or complaining on conference calls. So one recent weekend, on a leafy street in West Los Angeles, they gathered in person and invited me to join. In a backyard behind a four-bedroom home, ten people sat in a circle of plastic Adirondack chairs, eating bags of Skinny Pop. These are the rebels: well-off Los Angeles parents who send their children to Harvard-Westlake, the most prestigious private school in the city. By normal American standards, they are quite wealthy. By the standards of Harvard-Westlake, they are average. These are two-career couples who credit their own success not to family connections or inherited wealth but to their own education. So it strikes them as something more than ironic that a school that costs more than $40,000 a year—a school with Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right hand, and Sarah Murdoch, wife of Lachlan and Rupert’s daughter-in-law, on its board—is teaching students that capitalism is evil. For most parents, the demonization of capitalism is the least of it. They say that their children tell them they’re afraid to speak up in class. Most of all, they worry that the school’s new plan to become an “anti-racist institution”—unveiled this July, in a 20-page document—is making their kids fixate on race and attach importance to it in ways that strike them as grotesque. More at the link
[AmericanSpectator] Not those who keep teaching their children the skills they need, regardless of how supposedly “racist” they are now. | |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #8 If all it is is woke networking then the folks involved are probably happy. That networking will mean even an idiot can have jobs and support as long as they don't cross the woke/mob. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2021-03-11 15:02 |
| #7 I guess it never occurred to them to seek a less prestigious school that better meets their needs for education. They can't imagine sending their kids to a Midwestern college, even Northwestern. Not so. Harvard-Westlake School in Beverly Hills sends a very large % of its kids to UChicago and U. Michigan as well as Northwestern. The common trait here is leftist politics: even Chicago has become Woke in the last 5 years. The top public schools in California are full of Asians, mainly Chinese, who tend toward the subjects that still favor merit, rigor and no-BS: engineering and math. Those schools and their Asian students prefer the top flagship public universities that are known for STEM-- not just UCLA-UCB-UCSD-UCI but also STEM powerhouses like U. Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Carnegie Mellon. |
| Posted by: Enver Chineger4228 2021-03-11 12:21 |
| #6 Sooner or later, the aspirational and status-obsessed parents will realize the ivy+ and top liberal arts colleges are just an elite circle jerk that has nothing to do with education. They're now basically finishing schools that teach a set of manners and turns of phrase that send signals of belonging to a particular social circle. That circle now defines itself as much by Woke bullshit as by any measure of real achievement or mastery of anything. |
| Posted by: Fat Bob Panda4017 2021-03-11 12:13 |
| #5 I hate to break the news to them; but the Ivy League is also looking for "diversity"--which meant sharply reducing the number of admits from the snooty prep schools--as long ago as 1966 (when Yale admitted me from a Catholic high school in California as part of the then diversification effort.) |
| Posted by: Tom 2021-03-11 11:52 |
| #4 I guess it never occurred to them to seek a less prestigious school that better meets their needs for education. They can't imagine sending their kids to a Midwestern college, even Northwestern. |
| Posted by: Bobby 2021-03-11 11:00 |
| #3 There is not education in these elite ivy league schools but rather communist indoctrination. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2021-03-11 09:36 |
| #2 ^ Hence Rule No. 1 of grifting - There can be nothing greater than the grift. I think Marx commented on that in some way... |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2021-03-11 08:25 |
| #1 "Catholicism does not handle people in groups according to some superficial characteristic such as ethnicity or skin color. Instead, God teaches us that he values each single person. Each individual is a unique child of God, and God has a unique good in mind for each of us. The rest of us either help to advance that good – because we can conceive of none better – or we ought to get out of the way." https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2021/03/11/underrating-jesus-christ/ |
| Posted by: newc 2021-03-11 01:51 |