Wednesday, January 12, 2022

"I’m well aware of the stereotypes of white parents choosing the private-school option when the going gets tough at public schools."

"I told myself that prioritizing being a 'good leftist' at the expense of my son’s well-being wasn’t good parenting, but as a red-diaper baby myself, the white guilt dies hard... Sending my kid to private school was accompanied by a lot of angst....  The pandemic, and the school-reopening debate in particular, has thrown me into an ideological mid-life crisis, questioning all my prior political assumptions. I’m still attempting to hold onto the progressive label while calling out the policies I see as antithetical to it, but the longer fellow progressives support new school closures and other policies that restrict kids’ lives in order to allay the anxieties of adults, and have been shown to cause far more harm than benefit, the more alienated I feel."

From "How School Closures Made Me Question My Progressive Politics/I’ve never felt more alienated from the liberal Democratic circles I usually call home" by Rebecca Bodenheimer (Politico).