PRIVATE SCHOOL aWOKEning
trying to adapt,” she says, “but not doing it very gracefully.” And their own history is stacked against them... The school, like the neighborhood surrounding it, was established in the 1970s by white Angelenos fleeing the newly integrated areas in central LA. Savage explains, “To then go in, you know, 40 years later and try to retrofit diversity, equity, and inclusion into a school that was founded on exclusion is difficult to do.” From Savage’s point of view, it looks like mostly meaningless lip service – and too little too late – as she recalls the days when Black and Hispanic students, who were typically on scholarships, sought refuge in her classroom and the creative outlet it offered amid a highly competitive culture where they were often derided as affirmative action admits and told they should “be grateful” to be there. Whereas Savage found herself pressured by parents to hand out A’s to the celebrated, high-achieving, Ivy-bound students who viewed art classes as an afterthought and rarely darkened her classroom door.
All the players in this saga carry their own cursed inheritance. But of all these accounts, it’s the Riverdale anecdote I heard at the party that stands out... It was by far the mildest “woke” offense I’ve heard anyone attempt to add to this category – and easily the most extreme overreaction. Somewhere in my extended web of acquaintance is a 13-year- old girl who was sent to a convent school for the crime of telling her father that, per her teacher, Trump’s the worst president ever. What truly amazes is his reaction’s near certainty to backfire. Nothing stokes a teenager’s appetite for free-thinking rebellion quite like life in an actual nunnery – but that’s probably a good thing. (Or so they teach me in developmental psych class.) It makes me oddly hopeful, too, to consider how ridiculous these adults must look to the children in their charge. If enough kids come out of these at times self-contradictory and now embattled curricula thinking for themselves about the complexity of our manmade problems, convinced of nothing but each other’s immutable humanity – and fallibility and susceptibility to faddish freak- outs and all other manners of foolishness – then, well, that’s an education. Alice Lloyd is a writer and reporter in Washington, D.C., covering culture, politics, and the weirdness in between. Her work has been featured in the New York Times , the Washington Post , the Boston Globe , and the Weekly Standard .
PARENTS JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND
A chief culprit in the woke wars, in other words, is the interfering parent. “I don’t have a lot of sympathy for those parents,” Savage wants to clarify. “For a lot of parents, private schools are about their own ego identification. Kids become an extension of that. Imagine being the child of that parent? What an empty, sad world to live in.” As the poet wrote, They eff you up, your mom and dad, they may not mean to, but they do ...
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June 2021
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