An English teacher resigned her position at a pricey New Jersey private school in objection to the prevalence of what she called “regressive and illiberal” orthodoxies associated with critical race theory.
Dwight-Englewood School near Manhattan stunted learning and placed “ideological blinders” on students by teaching them that women and racial minorities are oppressed by default, said Dana Stangel-Plowe.
“The school’s ideology requires students to see themselves not as individuals, but as representatives of a group, forcing them to adopt the status of privilege or victimhood,” Stangel-Plowe wrote in her resignation letter to school leaders and her fellow English Department teachers.
“As a result, students arrive in my classroom accepting this theory as fact: People born with less melanin in their skin are oppressors, and people born with more melanin in their skin are oppressed. Men are oppressors, women are oppressed, and so on,” she said in the letter, posted online by the Foundation Against Racism and Intolerance, an organization seeking “to bring about a world in which we are all judged by the content of our character and not by the color of our skin.”
HERE’S WHERE CRITICAL RACE THEORY STANDS IN CLASSROOMS AND TRAINING ACROSS THE COUNTRY
Stangel-Plowe expressed that students at the school, which costs $52,100 to attend for those in grades six through 12, have become unable to think critically and won’t entertain alternative viewpoints.
“Sadly, the school is leading many to become true believers and outspoken purveyors of a regressive and illiberal orthodoxy,” she said. “Understandably, these students have found comfort in their moral certainty, and so they have become rigid and closed-minded, unable or unwilling to consider alternative perspectives.”
Students won’t examine literature without referencing notions of oppression, Stangel-Plowe added.
“I teach students who recoil from a poem because it was written by a man. I teach students who approach texts in search of the oppressor,” she said.
“This ideology limits students’ ability to observe and engage with the full fabric of human experience in our literature,” she added.
“Fear pervades the faculty” because of the school’s dominant ideology, Stangel-Plowe wrote, alleging that in both 2017 and 2018, the school’s principal told teachers “that he would fire us all if he could so that he could replace us all with people of color.”
Teachers were separated on the basis of skin color during a recent faculty meeting, she claimed.
“Teachers who had light skin were placed into a ‘white caucus’ group and asked to ‘remember’ that we are ‘white’ and ‘to take responsibility for [our] power and privilege,'” Stangel-Plowe said, adding that the exercise was “regressive and demeaning to us as individuals with our own moral compass and human agency.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to Dwight-Englewood School Principal Joseph Algrant for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
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At least 19 states have taken up legislation to ban or have either restricted or countered the teaching of critical race theory or associated concepts, such as that members of a particular race or sex are responsible for the past actions of other individuals of the same race or sex, in public schools and state employee training.
