Dana Stangel-Plowe, an English teacher has resigned from the Dwight-Englewood School in Bergen County for its use of critical race theory to create a “hostile culture of conformity and fear.” She holds that this approach is causing white and male students to believe they are “oppressors.”
Stangel-Plowe, who is graduate of Cornell University and a published poet, has taught English to high school students at Dwight-Englewood since 2014.
According to foxnews.com, the teacher accused the school of forcing students and faculty to embrace a single set of beliefs, conditioning free-speech in the process. “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,” Stangel-Plowe wrote in her letter to the school authorities.
“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,” the teacher added.
Breaking: Dana Stangel-Plowe, an award-winning teacher, resigned from Dwight-Englewood school after many attempts to advocate pro-human values in education.
(1/3) pic.twitter.com/uqbmC0BJbX— Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR) (@fairforall_org) June 8, 2021
Stangel-Plowe read this educational perspective as a fracturing system of belief. “This is the dominant and divisive ideology that is guiding our adolescent students.”
You can read: Colombian pride: Juliana Urtubey named U.S. National Teacher of the Year
The teacher explained that as a consequence of these “anti-racist” teachings, her students have become obsessed with power structures and group identity. “This fixation has stunted their ability to observe and engage with the full fabric of human experience in our literature,” Stangel-Plowe wrote in her letter.
No alternative perspectives
Students “have become rigid and closed-minded, unable or unwilling to consider alternative perspectives.”
“I reject D-E’s essentialist, racialist thinking about myself, my colleagues, and my students,” the educator wrote. “D-E claims that we teach students how to think, not what to think. But sadly, that is just no longer true.”
Her resignation letter and materials from the school were published on the website for the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR), a nonpartisan organization dedicated to advancing civil rights and liberties for all Americans.