aWOKEning
PRIVATE SCHOOL other private schools’ systemically racist dust. Plus, then head of school Steve Nelson, who – disclosure – was my first call for this piece, habitually encouraged dissent and previewed the diversity program for parents before debuting it with students. (Among those who supported it were the two white male conservative Calhoun dads who happened to be chairing the board of trustees at the time.) When he found out I went to Dartmouth, Nelson announced he’d carried on a correspondence for years with English professor Jeffrey Hart, the founding faculty advisor of the Dartmouth Review and a book Diversity education shouldn’t begin in any serious depth before children’s understanding of the world beyond their immediate experience has developed to comprehend higher-level precepts like equality. Nelson and I talked for hours about Calhoun’s anti-racist curriculum, mostly confirming what I remembered: that what Calhoun taught very closely resembled the wokeness we’re hearing about now. And why didn’t it go horribly awry? To begin with, “The idea some parents might have that those kinds of discussions actually estrange kids from one another is simply wrong,” Nelson said, adding... critic for National Review . To his credit, Nelson, when he told me this, had no way of knowing that I’d be impressed instead of horrified, as most of Hart’s colleagues were by his Right-wing views.
I don’t like some of the glib language around social justice and diversity. But I think when you can allow a space where it’s non-threatening for kids to talk about difficult things, it actually makes living together better, not worse. In contrast to the gradual and in-house implementation at Calhoun, a lot of the common complaints today concern sudden changes to curriculum or the intrusions of outside consultants – forces that, understandably, seem to threaten a school’s cultural equilibrium in a way that discourages discussion. And, crucially, diversity education shouldn’t begin in any serious depth before children’s understanding of the world beyond their immediate experience has developed to comprehend higher-level precepts like equality. (A child’s self-centered early sense of what’s fair or unfair doesn’t count.) “Getting into the theoretical aspects of race theory, or very complex issues around white privilege, is not something that kids at a young age should try to grapple with,” as Nelson put it. “It doesn’t surprise me that there would be pushback.” What began as pushback has piled up into a full-blown panic... Tense partisanship and leering tabloid coverage have turned the idea of systemic racism and the lesson plans that address it into the latest terrifying problem facing the nation – just when we thought peace and normalcy were upon us. But, when you think about it, it’s not really a new way to talk about race. And I don’t mean that it’s been around a while in academia, though it has. I mean it’s remarkably consistent with the morality of Huck Finn , for instance. In order to sell books and
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June 2021
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