K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Whoops! One of the Critical Race Theory Elect goes down.
Jim Best is out as headmaster of the Dalton School. Knew this one was coming. He totally deserved it, but I wonder if the board was just upset at all the publicity.
Johnston did a couple of damning blog posts on Dalton back in December, attracting the attention of Roger Kimball and Ed Driscoll, and even others. Faculty demands were breathtakingly woke. In March, Bari Weiss interviewed terrified parents at a number of prep schools. Terrified of CRT. But they should really be terrified that the prep schools are pushing CRT because that’s what the Ivy League wants.
Then Caitlin Flanagan took on the whole prep school edifice. Including the parents. For reasons that go beyond CRT. 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.”
Were online classes a mistake? Heh.
Plus several quotes from from John McWhorter on the topic, including:
One more thing: We need a crisper label for the problematic folk. . .
The author and essayist Joseph Bottum has found the proper term, and I will adopt it here: We will term these people The Elect. They do think of themselves as bearers of a wisdom, granted them for any number of reasons—a gift for empathy, life experience, maybe even intelligence. But they see themselves as having been chosen, as it were, by one or some of these factors, as understanding something most do not.“The Elect” is also good in implying a certain smugness, which is sadly accurate as a depiction. Of course, most of them will resist the charge. But its sitting in the air, in its irony, may also encourage them to resist the definition, which over time may condition at least some of them to temper the excesses of the philosophy, just as after the 1980s many started disidentifying from being “too PC.”
But most importantly, terming these people The Elect implies a certain air of the past, à la Da Vinci Code. This is apt, in that the view they think of as sacrosanct is directly equivalent to views people centuries before us were as fervently devoted to as today’s Elect are. The medieval Catholic passionately defended prosecuting Jews and Muslims with what we now see was bigoted incoherence, rooted in the notion that those with other beliefs and origins were lesser humans. We spontaneously “other” those antique inquisitors in our times, but right here and now we are faced with people who harbor the exact same brand of mission, just against different persons. . .
I’m not sure about “The Elect,” when Thomas Sowell had the perfect phrase for elite leftists 25 years ago in the title of his classic book The Vision of the Anointed.
Read the whole thing.