The first lesson to learn from the left is the need to start with the high-prestige institutions.
This goes against the grain of many conservatives, who have learned to despise elites and elitism — precisely because the left succeeded so thoroughly in corrupting the elite institutions.
But education is highly feudal in nature, with status and prestige prized above all else, at least until the money runs out, at which point money becomes the determinant.
And that's the second lesson: attack the financial basis of support of the elite institutions in order to get their attention and to bully them into changing their ways.
I use the term "bully" consciously, because a lifetime of observation of elite academic institutions has convinced me that most educators are the opposite of brave.
They generally regard life in the private sector as unacceptably exposed to the risk of failure, with people getting fired for under-performance, measured by the fabled "bottom line."
University and secondary school leaders see themselves as buffeted by enormous pressures, fighting for the survival of their institutions, all the more so now that demography is cutting the size of the cohorts of students entering higher education.
We have a current example of the sort of approach that would work, in the case of the resignation of a teacher named Dana Stengel-Plowe from the Dwight-Englewood School, protesting the indoctrination of students there in Critical Race Theory.
You can read her entire letter of resignation here (
https://www.fairforall.org/profiles-in-courage/dwight-englewood-whistleblower/) but an except gives the flavor:
I became a teacher at Dwight-Englewood because, as a parent, I loved how the school both nurtured and challenged my own children. Today, I am resigning from a job I love because D-E has changed in ways that undermine its mission and prevent me from holding true to my conscience as an educator.
I believe that D-E is failing our students. Over the past few years, the school has embraced an ideology that is damaging to our students' intellectual and emotional growth and destroying any chance at creating a true community among our diverse population. I reject the hostile culture of conformity and fear that has taken hold of our school.
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. They must locate themselves within the oppressor or oppressed group, or some intersectional middle where they must reckon with being part-oppressor and part-victim. This theory of power hierarchies is only one way of seeing the world, and yet it pervades D-E as the singular way of seeing the world.
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. This is the dominant and divisive ideology that is guiding our adolescent students.
Tuition for high school at Dwight-Englewood currently is $52,100 a year, and it is a good bet that most parents who cough up a substantial portion of that fee do so in hopes that their children will get a leg up in admission to a high-prestige college.
D-E is prestigious, but not in the top handful of private secondary schools.
In various rankings, it comes out as second-tier — still elite, but not the very top.
This makes it very vulnerable to pressure — which is why the suggestion of John McWhorter, a renowned linguistics professor at Columbia University, is spot on:
