The elite New York private school, Horace Mann, is the focus of an excellent expose in New York Magazine. The most shocking aspect is the amount of outright pure racist and anti-woman hate the article exposes as seemingly tolerated, and even defended (!) by some on the Board of Directors, administration and students.
The school’s website states the school’s purpose and focus:
Horace Mann has changed in many ways but remains steadfastly dedicated to five core values: The Life of the Mind, Mature Behavior, Mutual Respect, A Secure and Healthful Environment, and A Balance between Individual Achievement and a Caring Community.
If there is any truth in the article it would mean that the Horace Mann School has utterly failed in achieving it’s own stated goals.
This brings up some important issues that go far beyond the shockingly bad behavior of a privileged elite that sees itself as entitled to be served and catered to no matter what it does or says.
First: How and why did the City of New York help fund a wealthy private school by issuing a bond when the public schools suffer? How dare they? How many other private schools have been helped this way? Why exactly, was this school helped by the city government?
Second: Look at how this group considers everyone, even professionals such as educators, to be their servants and “hired help”. And this is what they have modeled for their children.
Third: Isn’t there a relationship between the attitude and values taught by this elite and those who feed the extreme disrespect for women which we see in the media in this current presidential campaign? And they have DEFENDED racism as well?
Fourth: Why would anyone send a daughter to this school?
Fifth: How many other private schools behave this way?
New York City is full of wonderful, talented, smart and really goods kids who deserve a good education and preparation for the future. We must support public education as the cornerstone to a healthy, creative, productive society and a continuing good future. Public School should not be treated as an “entitlement program” to be disrespected and underfunded.
Parents should teach children the core value of respect for teachers by their very own behavior.
Money never buys class.
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Comment by NYCGUY:
A few years ago, while crossing Broadway on the Upper West Side, I overhead the conversation of a young boy and his father.
The child expressed a desire to copy the career of his favorite teacher and his parent replied that that would be an inappropriate pursuit.
To hear something like that and in such a neighborhood was utterly shocking. So maybe the esteem I had learned for Horace Mann was equally ill-placed. This is, after all, an epoch of an all voluntary armed forces subject to stop loss, which is nothing other than involuntary servitude, serfdom if one wishes to give it a polite name.
What really got me was the story inside the story about this prestigious private, tax exempt school getting a substantial tax free loan from the city’s so-called Economic Development Corporation, facilitated by the city’s corporation counsel under its preceding mayor for whom this chap remains a loyal business partner.
This perfectly legal transaction whereby EDC makes like the NYS Dormitory Authority for very high tuition K-12 private schools - parochial schools included - is a hallmark of the current mayoralty that just happens to have saddled Horace Mann with considerable debt.
Ostensibly the beneficiaries provide an undefined high level of scholarships and public service. Apparently, the private schools are better integrated than the city’s own public schools - which have no boards with any effective parental input - because, obviously, they’re creaming from the body of perspective students.
Lost in this is that public schools are intended to create an educated citizenry and that the city is using its federally capped industrial revenue bond authority to benefit elite institutions not subject to endless teach-to-testing while its own system has cut back capital expenditures for school renovations and new construction. Is something amiss?
Maybe the Horace Mann students understand the “respect” they’re given does not accrue to their teachers or perhaps even the gifted scholarship classmates.
NYCGUY
This is such a thoroughly beautiful and enjoyable production of South Pacific and it deserves all of the wonderful reviews it has received. This is a great musical done superbly.
