NEW YORK (PNN) - April 19, 2021 - More parents are waking up to the “woke” ideology that is seeping into their children’s classrooms and curriculum. Increasingly, they are speaking up and opting out.

Last week, Andrew Gutmann, a father of a student at the elite, $54,000-a-year Brearley School in Manhattan, wrote a scathing open letter to the school community. He stated that he wouldn’t be re-enrolling his daughter this upcoming academic year due to the school’s singular focus on “anti-racism” efforts that, according to Gutmann, are overtly racist and exclusionary.

“I object to Brearley’s vacuous, inappropriate, and fanatical use of words such as ‘equity,’ ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusiveness,’” wrote Gutmann in his 1700-word letter, which was published on Friday at journalist Bari Weiss’s website.

“If Brearley’s administration was truly concerned about so-called ‘equity,’ it would be discussing the cessation of admissions preferences for legacies, siblings, and those families with especially deep pockets," the letter continues. "If the administration was genuinely serious about ‘diversity,’ it would not insist on the indoctrination of its students and their families to a single mindset, most reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Instead, the school would foster an environment of intellectual openness and freedom of thought."

"If Brearley really cared about ‘inclusiveness,’ the school would return to the concepts encapsulated in the motto ‘One Brearley,’" Gutmann concludes. "Instead of teaching the extraordinarily divisive idea that there are only and always two groups in this country: victims and oppressors.”

The Brearley School’s headmaster responded to the letter, calling it “deeply offensive and harmful.” But more parents are coming forward to speak up against these initiatives that are rooted in critical race theory, the push to view social and cultural issues through the lens of racial identity and, in particular, power structures related to that identity.

In an article last month at City Journal, Weiss described many of the parents who have come forward from prestigious private schools in major cities to criticize what they see as indoctrination of their children into a Leftist ideology of “wokeism”. In an article last week, Weiss shared a letter from a teacher at one of these prep schools who is no longer willing to be silent about this ongoing indoctrination of students.

“As a teacher, my first obligation is to my students,” wrote Paul Rossi, who teaches mathematics at the posh Grace Church High School in New York City. “But right now, my school is asking me to embrace ‘antiracism’ training and pedagogy that I believe is deeply harmful to them and to any person who seeks to nurture the virtues of curiosity, empathy and understanding."

"‘Antiracist’ training sounds righteous, but it is the opposite of truth in advertising," Rossi concluded. "It requires teachers like myself to treat students differently on the basis of race.”

Grace Church High School made headlines in March for releasing an Inclusive Language Guide that, among other recommendations, urged the school community to become more “welcoming and inclusive” by avoiding words such as “mom and dad,” “parents,” and “boys and girls”.