Chicagoland’s Latin School, Francis Parker, and Culver jump on the NAIS lemming bandwagon
Once upon a time "Preppy" meant understatement. You wore seersucker, madras, and linen in the summer not to shout, but to signal a code. You belonged to a school, a town, a nation, all of which were (significantly) larger than you. You existed to explore the world, not to beam about your own “lived experience” or lament your “privilege,” as if either mattered.
Above all, "preppy" meant you were part of something: an institution, a tradition, a duty. The uniform wasn’t self-expression; it was self-restraint (and no, body positivity did not exist back in the day; you were fit or fat). You weren’t told to “live your truth.” You were told to tuck in your shirt, shut up, and get on with it. You weren’t asked how you felt about the world; you were expected to carry its weight.
That discipline produced citizens — and soldiers, when duty called. Boys who left Groton, Andover, St. Paul's or Latin marched off to France or the Pacific in the first half of the 20th century not with curated “identities” (he/him), but as lieutenants and ensigns, indistinguishable in khaki or grey. Many never came back. Hundreds lie in marked and unmarked graves, their sacrifice a quiet footnote in American history. And one written by every class, when service was expected of all.
Today, the preppy uniform is a dress code in irony: Patagonia fleeces, curated Instagram feeds, and personal brands (including manufactured gender identities), collectively masquerading as values. What once bound you to something larger now inflates the self until it blots out community, school, or nation.
Institutions no longer tower above the student; the student is the institution.
Today, most prep school brochures beam with “identity” and “lived experience,” as if the world should adjust to the self, not the other way around. Where preppy once meant finding one’s place in the broader universe, it now means a masturbatory exercise in glorifying one’s ego and degree of victimhood — with a ring light, diversity consultant (selling “privilege” indulgences), and a $50,000 tuition.
And the new brand? There’s only one, and it’s the same at each school.
Global citizenship
The phrase global citizenship shows up in every glossy admissions packet, every “Portrait of a Graduate” slide deck, every curriculum outline.
The old preppy code has been replaced by a new one: Not loyalty, not service, but slogans, which all sound remarkably similar, as if they came from the same marketing agency. Because, well, they did.
In the Chicago area, Latin, Parker and Culver sound like clones of themselves:
- Latin: "By focusing on the rights and responsibilities of global citizenship…"
- Parker: "Responsible citizens and leaders in a diverse democratic society and global community."
- Culver: "Our programs help students live responsibly as global citizens."
Or journey to where preppy began (i.e., New England) where Phillips Exeter offers “A vital lesson in global citizenship through experiential immersion,” Groton offers to “educate students to become caring, ethical, and knowledgeable citizens of the world," and Andover suggests, "Learning in the world prepares young people for engaged global citizenship."
I could go on (with hundreds of schools). Deerfield, Choate, Hotchkiss: Same hymn, different choir.
The founders, often ministers, of nearly all of these schools would find it a tragicomedy indeed that their sermons on duty, piety, and — God forbid — Latin grammar have been hijacked by what is essentially a corporate lefty mission statement with better landscaping. It’s as if Calvin and Knox were replaced by the executive team from Target and Cracker Barrel.
The irony? The very institutions once designed to breed the WASP elite now traffic in the same vanilla-flavored platitudes that make Starbucks barista training sound radical by comparison. That’s not education; it’s indoctrination lite — hold the rigor, add oat milk.
Each school now reads like a DNA clone of the other. It’s as if every admissions office hacked into the prep school version of 23andMe and replicated the same genome. You know, the one that insists boys in women’s sports is “equitable,” that discipline undermines a “culture of kindness,” and that every math class must be wrapped in “social and emotional learning.”
From experience as a parent and alum of a number of these schools, let me state that these are NAIS-originated phrases (see below), not education. And they should make every birthing parent and non-lactating guardian sprint — like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible — for the trenches, tuition check in hand, praying for cover fire.
I know this firsthand. My own prep school, Shipley, now uses the same language (yes, the same Shipley that must issue a trigger warning in science class that physics is racist). Shipley’s Portrait of a Graduate promises every student will leave as a "confident, compassionate, and capable global citizen."
The academics page spells it out even plainer: Shipley prepares you not just for college but for global citizenship. It's everywhere: in admissions copy, in "global programs," even in the alumni materials
In case you’re wondering, this Kamala-esque buzzword consommé is farm-to-teleprompter, not farm-to-table. And no, it’s not original. It’s beamed down from the Global Citizenship Death Star, where Latin declensions and chapel sermons get liquefied into a rainbow smoothie and re-sold as “inclusive rigor.”
The National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), which I explored in the essay, How NAIS Took Over Elite Education, writes the script. Their Principles of Good Practice tell schools to present "a worldview that rewards curiosity about human diversity.” Translation: Orwell’s Animal Farm with better PR. Black and brown good. White and Jew bad.
Debra Wilson, NAIS’s president, has turned “global citizenship” into the free-range Whole Foods eggs of independent education: Ubiquitous, overpriced, multicolored, and marketed as essential. Essential to what? To signaling virtue, to soothing the neuroses of affluent yoga moms (whose husbands work 80 hour weeks so they can do handstands), and to apologizing — loudly — for the original sin of being born white?
Heads of school oblige. They scurry like clerks at a Soviet breadline, copy-pasting the phrase into mission statements, curricula, summer programs, and glossy admissions decks. By the time it becomes a banner plastered on the road leading up to the school, it’s less a promise of education than a moral invoice.
And the source material? Not Andover’s or Groton’s archives (which I’ve actually crawled around in when writing a history of the schools for my master’s thesis). It comes straight from UNESCO's Global Citizenship Education (2011), linked to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It comes from Davos, where the World Economic Forum packages "global citizenship" as the lifestyle accessory of the ruling class, right between the private jet carbon offsets and $18 dollar smoothies.
By the time it hits Shipley’s or Baldwin’s admissions page, it's been laundered through more committees than a Russian oligarch's money, until it looks like a moral commandment rather than a buzzword.
Ancient roots, modern copy
The phrase wasn't born in a Geneva conference room. The road to modern global citizenship is paved with Greek intentions: the philosophical kind, not the script plastered on the SAE house greeting freshmen before their first rager. What I'm talking about is the fraternity of the universe, originating with philosophers in the Greek and Roman world who saw the relationship of man to his immediate and extended surroundings.
It dates back to Diogenes of Sinope, the Greek cynic who lived in a barrel and insulted Alexander the Great to his face. When asked where he was from, Diogenes replied: "I am a citizen of the world (κοσμοπολίτης)." That wasn't a policy framework. It was a middle finger to identity politics, ancient style.
The Stoics picked it up. Epictetus wrote, “You are a citizen of the universe, not a stranger.” Marcus Aurelius — emperor of Rome and the most powerful man on earth — put it more bluntly: “As Antoninus, my city and country is Rome; as a man, it is the world.”
For the Stoics, cosmopolitanism was about virtue: Duty to fellow humans (even those not within a legion’s march of the famous Roman roads, but outside the empire), not slogans for admissions packets.
Yet the stoics did not settle the debate. Contrast them with Aristotle, who reminded us: "Man is by nature a political animal." Meaning: Humans thrive in a polis, a real community, rooted in shared customs and obligations. Citizenship without a polis is an abstraction. It's like being married to a political slogan instead of an actual person.
The Romans extended the discussion further. Cicero's De Officiis insisted we are born not for ourselves but for service to the community. Seneca said the wise person "embraces with the mind the whole human race as his nation." And Augustine later cut the idea in two: the earthly city of man and the heavenly city of God, one bound by politics, the other by ultimate loyalty.
That's the lineage: Diogenes, the Stoics, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Augustine. The eternal tension between local duty and universal belonging, a philosophical wrestling match that's lasted two millennia.
Now fast-forward to NAIS. Instead of teaching students this philosophical tension, that our obligations are both local and universal, the schools spoon-feed them a single, unexamined answer: you are a global citizen, full stop. Which, of course, translates into hating the West — specifically capitalism, self-determination, free thought, and those pesky Judeo-Christian teachings. In other words, shunning the very philosophical lineage that spent centuries wrestling with how to balance the self against the world outside.
It’s like teaching Romeo and Juliet but skipping the part about the families feuding (or in my case, watching The Hangover without the bachelor party scene).
The pipeline: UN → WEF → NAIS → prep schools
If you want the full history of the modern origins of Global Citizenship and how it helped kill the preppy, here's how the phrase traveled faster than a dank meme:
1948: The UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights plants the seeds: Dignity, equality, brotherhood.
2011: UNESCO formalizes Global Citizenship Education as part of SDG 4.7. Its mandate: instill "a transformative, lifelong pursuit" for peace, inclusion, and sustainability. (Translation: make students feel guilty about everything their ancestors did.)
2010s: The World Economic Forum rebrands the idea for Davos. Global citizenship becomes the virtue badge of the corporate elite, bundled with climate pledges and ESG panels. It's like a LinkedIn influencer post, but with more private helicopters and visits to Epstein’s Island.
2020s: NAIS operationalizes it. Debra Wilson (extra points for guessing she's got "She/Her" in her LinkedIn bio) and her predecessor transform "global citizenship" from UN paperwork into prep-school gospel. Latin, Parker, Culver, Andover, Exeter, Groton, Deerfield, Choate, Hotchkiss all repeat the line verbatim, with the originality of lemmings headed for a cliff.
By this point, there’s no philosophy, just catechism.
Now, I would agree “global citizenship” sounds lovely, a passport to visit the world, a visa to stay and explore. Who wouldn't want our kids to learn respect for other cultures, empathy for the downtrodden, and curiosity to explore beyond the border?
It all sounds great. But the NAIS version of global citizenship is the antithesis of what it purports to be. It's a nefarious scam, a Trojan horse designed to make bad ideas sound enlightened. The NAIS version isn't a passport. It's a scarlet letter with a screaming "I" for intersectionality, or as some have called it, the victim olympics. It shuns the very foundation of what has made the West the most successful experiment in human history.
Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom – a book that curiously can be difficult to find in NAIS-affiliated prep school libraries – that "it is neither necessary nor desirable that national sovereignty should be transferred to a new super-state. To vest authority over the economic life of nations in such an international authority would create the most powerful totalitarian system imaginable."
Now, replace “economic life” with “moral formation,” and you’ve got the NAIS playbook. And the serfs are not farmers chained to the land, but prep school kids chained to lectures on the moral virtues of progressive dogma — global citizens in name, ideological slaves trained to hate their lineage in practice.
What got lost
The preppy ethos, for all its flaws, was at least rooted: in family, town, school, nation. Preppies may have been smugger than a Tesla owner at a gas station (except in the winter), but they were accountable to real communities. Global citizenship, as preached by NAIS, eviscerates that rootedness.
The new uniform is rhetorical. Instead of navy blazers and J. Press (or Brooks, if you must) ties, the outfit is blue hair and chest binders. The look isn’t “preparation for life,” it’s cosplay for grievance. Intellectual curiosity and the encouragement of contrarian arguments have been tossed in the rubbish bin, replaced with compulsory virtue signaling and the religion of the self.
And any notion of duty — to school, to country, to something higher than your own reflection — is treated like contraband unless it comes packaged as reparations, either philosophical (anti-racist “Kendi” lectures) or financial such as raising money for BLM, Gaza (i.e., Hamas terrorists) or whatever the next NGO-du-jour happens to be.
Worse, the “empathy” on offer is about as even-handed as a Botox job — stretched, frozen, and fake. Antisemitic incidents get brushed aside, while white boys are turned into diversity pinballs, ricocheting around the classroom as living proof of “original sin.” And if you dare to dissent? Your voice is iced faster than a Moscow critic with the wrong friends in the GRU. At Shipley and other NAIS factories, families have even been nudged toward the exit simply for refusing to salute the global-citizenship politburo.
The bait and switch makes it more insidious. Parents think they’re paying $50,000 a year for Shakespeare, calculus, and character. But instead they get UNESCO in a polo shirt. It's like ordering a Peter Lugar or Gibson’s dry aged steak and getting an overcooked Beyond Burger with an Etonian accent and a side of Marx.
If this were harmless brochure copy, no one would care. But it shapes the moral formation of elites, tomorrow's tech company founders, senators, and Supreme Court justices. When Latin or Exeter tells a 16-year-old he is a "global citizen," it's not teaching him Aristotle's balance between polis and cosmos. It's teaching him a pre-loaded ideology: that his duty is abstract, transnational, detached from local community, church, or country.
That's how you hollow out the idea of real citizenship and kill America. When loyalty to town, state, and nation weakens, the abstract global replaces it. Not because it's deeper, but because it's easier. It's less demanding to declare "I stand for humanity" than to shovel your neighbor's snow, serve on the school board, or confront corruption in city hall.
Global empathy is local apathy dressed in Prada with a nose ring and a Stizzy cart.
Save the preppy
The death of the preppy at the hand of “Global Citizenship” doesn’t have to be permanent. So far, saving “prep” has been a little like saving Ferris Bueller — everyone’s in on the joke, but nobody’s cutting AP U.S. History to do it. “Save Ferris” painted on a water tower, or whispered by Tucker Carlson while interviewing Dr. Evil’s interns, isn’t revival. Rather, it’s performative woke-right antics dressed up as rescue — a Qatari-financed Ferris sequel filmed on Greta’s yacht, scored by Coldplay, and live-streamed by the World Economic Forum between panels on insect protein and anti-Zionism, climaxing with Klaus Schwab lip-syncing Twist and Shout.
The actual rescue starts by teaching tension, not catechism (and certainly not blaming the Jews). Bring Aristotle and Diogenes back into the classroom. Show students the argument between polis and cosmos. Train them to see both obligations, not one narrative blessed at Davos and underwritten by Doha. Philosophy is about questions — not answers downloaded from a UN website or a bunch of sheiks hell bent on destroying the West.
Start with local citizenship. Before Exeter ships a kid to Peru for “global immersion,” teach them to serve their own community without Instagram stories. Volunteer in towns gutted by fentanyl (yes, even if the victims, horror of horrors, are white). Mentor in a local public school. Build habits of service that no “world summit” can replicate. You can’t love humanity if you can’t love your hometown.
At the institutional level: stop insulting your graduates and teaching current students to gaslight anyone and anything that doesn’t fit a singular narrative. And above all, drop the copy-paste. Mission statements shouldn’t sound like a McKinsey strategy deck recycled across clients. Rediscover your own histories. Groton doesn’t need UNESCO to talk about service. It has FDR, who was controversial enough on his own (even to Groton). Andover doesn’t need Davos to define empathy. It has its own legacy of abolition and reform—and above all service in the wars that defined this great nation, including the elimination of slavery.
And call hypocrisy by name. You can’t sermonize about global empathy while winking at antisemitism or exiling kids and families who don’t kneel to the progressive catechism. That’s not inclusion. That’s a demonic country club with pronouns on the name tags and pitchforks in place of golf clubs.
Accountability starts by rebuilding the preppy ethos, minus the smugness. At its best, preppy was about character, restraint, loyalty to real institutions and, of course, service. Last century, prep boys went off to war, to public office, to civic duty. Now the path is investment-banking internships or “studies” classes disguised within traditional majors designed to reinforce grievance and brainwash the next generation.
But it doesn’t have to stay that way. The phrase “global citizen” is salvageable. Not as Davos-speak mind you, but as Diogenes meant it: a challenge to parochialism, not a script to institutionalize it.
If schools — prep or public — want to lead again, they must return to their roots: teach the classics alongside math and science, demand real service, honor their history and the gifts of the West. Only then can they graduate students who are citizens of something real: polis, nation, and yes, the wider world.
And yes, teach the full history including that slavery was a human constant in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia long before America was born. Our sin wasn’t originality (the 1619 Project, more accurately should have been labeled the Africa 1000BC Project), it was hypocrisy given the promise of the Declaration of Independence. And wrestling with that contradiction is what actually builds citizens.
Because without roots, “global” is just drift. And drift doesn’t build character. It leaves you doubled over the rail of Greta’s carbon-neutral cruise liner, sailing under the flag of moral superiority, on your way to cheer a “liberation” movement that would turn her rainbow-crew into ballast at the first port of call in any Muslim country along the way — while still shouting “genocide” in Gaza, where the population chart looks less like a tragedy and more like a venture-funded growth curve.
J.D. Busch, who works in tech and finance during the day, writes about the decline of polite society at night. Although watching the corporate version of “global citizenship” torch billions in enterprise value, it’s hard to tell where one job ends and the other begins.
