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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If you are headed to Sidwell, just be prepared for hearing about social justice issues,  over and over, all the time. It’s relentless. Everything has to have a message. [/quote]

This is true and to my DC, frankly, it's annoying. But take heart -- it's nowhere near as bad as it is at GDS.[/quote]

Serious question: We had good friends pull their kids out of GDS not b/c they have a social justice bent, but b/c on just about every social justice issue, they had a SPECIFIC bent. Instead of encouraging openness, it seemed to channel the students into one set of ways of talking about issues. I know Sidwell won’t have such a pronounced social justice bent as GDS, but whatever bent it has, is it specific? I’m actually quite supportive of being socially conscious and aware, and we are thinking of applying our DC to Sidwell next year. However, given that we were turned off by our friend’s experience at GDS w/r/t social justice thought-channeling, I thought I’d ask this about Sidwell. How much freedom is there to think about issues of social justice in a variety of (non-jerk) ways? And are students mostly happy, to take it back to OP, because they are given some freedom? Or is it not quite that way? [/quote]

That's an interesting question, and it probably depends on the grade. Our experience is only up through middle school. There is a Quaker tradition of queries, where people silently reflect on an open-ended question, and those are often relating to community.  That tends to work against any kind of force-fed attitudes. It explicitly makes room for each student to develop their own ideas about an issue.  I would say that they also present some realities of the world to the kids without sugarcoating them, and together with the sense of fairness they try to cultivate, kids may tend to end up in a certain place on things. I have never felt like my kid was told what to think. [/quote]

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