New York father Andrew Gutmann believed he was sending his daughter to one of the best schools in the country. It’s called Brearley, and it’s a private all-girls school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that costs $54,000 per year, which is more than most colleges charge for tuition. But he believed it would be worth it — until he realized what the school was teaching.
In a letter Gutmann sent to all 600 or so families in the school last week, he warned the other parents that what their children were learning at Brearley was toxic, wrong, and deeply damaging. So after seven years, he decided to pull his daughter from the school, and he encouraged other parents to do the same.
What Gutmann discovered is that Brearley for years has been pushing critical race theory in its curriculum, teaching students that America is inherently racist, that white people are inherently racist, and that neither of those “facts” can be changed.
“I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs,” he wrote. “I object that Brearley is trying to usurp the role of parents in teaching morality and bullying parents to adopt that false morality at home.”
Brearley is hardly the only school pushing critical race theory. A teacher at a different private Christian school, called Grace Church School, confronted the school’s head about the curriculum that he was being asked to teach. During their conversation, the principal, George Davison, admitted to Rossi that the school’s “anti-racist training” was intended to make white students “feel less than, for nothing that they are personally responsible for.”
And then, there’s Dalton School, another elite Manhattan private school where students were forced to reenact “racist cops” in their science classes, “decenter” their “whiteness” in art class, and learn about “white supremacy and sexuality” in health class, according to frustrated parents. The school’s faculty even issued an “anti-racism” manifesto that called for an overhaul of the entire curriculum to better reflect social justice imperatives. Like Gutmann, parents protested, and many pulled their children out of Dalton.
This is what’s happening in America’s schools. Whether they’re public, private, or Christian, many, many schools across the country have introduced certain parts of critical race theory into their classrooms, and millions of young, impressionable students are suffering as a result. As Gutmann put it, these schools’ mission is to teach children what to think, not how to think. And for many, the damage has already been done.
