Word: barreness
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...Though Barr was nominally opposed to "the crude lash of competition," he sent his own four sons to the fiercely competitive Horace Mann School, and chipped away at Dalton's progressivism by installing tests to supplement written evaluations of students. In an opinionated article several years ago, he flayed teen-age sex ("robots in heat") and roasted permissive parents. "The trouble with many children," he declared, "is that their fathers are mothers and their mothers are sisters...
...Barr is sincerely concerned that today's students are so distracted by political activism and youth cultism that academic work is being slighted. His remedy is more adult models ("happy, controlled, competent people"). "What students need," he once wrote, "is something to rebel against that is worthy of their respect-even of healthy and manageable fear...
Such notions, though, did Barr no good in the new era of the Woodstock Nation and its admiring Dalton parents. As one Dalton mother said of her nine-year-old, "he's not our son; he's our friend." Barr was so out of it that he even tried to ban blue jeans and long hair on boys. While teaching a course on Marxism, he actually started wearing an American-flag pin on his lapel. When Barr began referring to staying after school as "detention," one father growled, "Will the children be allowed one phone call to their...
Plots and Plots. Last year, Barr expelled five sixth-graders, four for what he labeled "extortion," the fifth for stealing $15 from a teacher in order to meet the alleged junior extortionists' demands. As some parents saw it, this was a case for psychiatry, not punishment. They were aghast when Barr reportedly chortled to a school assembly, "I guess we got rid of those little gangsters, didn't we?" In a showdown board meeting last November, a faction of anti-Barr trustees asked for the headmaster's head. Eventually they were mollified by the appointment...
...Even so, Barr's supporters suspected his critics of plotting to fill two board vacancies with anti-Barr members, who would then swing a new vote to kick him out. Three weeks ago, the supporters mailed each parent a 21-page memo fingering Psychiatrist Myron Hofer, president of the P.T.A., as a chief anti-Barr plotter. Since Hofer represented the P.T.A. on the board, the memo urged parents to vote him out of office and thus oft7 the board...