George Packer Gets Mugged by Reality

The summer before kindergarten, an official informed Packer that his son had made it off the wait list at their preferred public school. “This school squared the hardest circle,” Packer writes. “It was a liberal white family’s dream.” He, his wife, and his son became invested in the institution. “The school’s approach — the year-long second-grade unit on the geology and bridges of New York — caught his imagination, while the mix of races and classes gave him something even more precious: an unselfconscious belief that no one was better than anyone else, that he was everyone’s equal and everyone was his.” Then, Packer says, “Things began to change.”

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Packer’s family was distraught by Donald Trump’s election. He found, however, that the school had deprived his son of a vocabulary to understand and oppose Trump on the basis of liberal principles: “By age 10 he had studied the civilizations of ancient China, Africa, the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, and the Mayans. He learned about the genocide of Native Americans and slavery. But he was never taught about the founding of the republic.” Packer notes that Richard Carranza, the far-left chancellor of New York City schools, mandated anti-bias instruction for school employees that categorized “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity,” and “worship of the written word” as hallmarks of “white supremacy culture.”

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