“America First” is an easy phrase to refute. It arose out of a largely anti-semitic refusal by many to fight Nazi Germany. It represents a policy of isolationism, which seems impractical and self-defeating, and it seems to go against some basic moral principle that suffering ought to be avoided by all who can help.

Yet of “America First,” I can imagine Mr. Trump thinking along the following lines: A country, just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. Thus, America, as one nuclear unit, ought to be committed to preserving itself, to prioritizing the security and needs of its parts, over the parts of other countries, as a body surely does.

That reasoning, at least the first part, should sound familiar. I’ve heard those words ring out a grand total of 14 times, during the Corinthian MXs that have always signaled a new school year. Just swap out America for Parker. So, the first part of a Trumpian argument stems directly from the words we choose to open the school year. That alone scares me.

But the connection between Trump’s nationalism and Parker’s is much deeper than mere rhetorical parallelism. Parker and other private educational institutions by their very nature promote their own form of nationalism, namely the idea that their students come first.
Take iPads, for example. The school, through funding that comes from tuition, gives every student in the Upper School an iPad, yet at the beginning of the school year, I watched what looked like half of my grade decide to not use the iPads that were designated for them. If I were to hypothesise, this is because nearly the entire student population of the Upper School has laptops, which for nearly all classes, do exactly what an iPad can do, but better. Thus, iPads are stored in boxes, for those who decided not to accept them, when presumably those iPads could have been given to a community in Chicago, where they would have been students’ primary computing device.

But the iPads are not given to a community that can derive much more benefit from their presence than us for the simple reason that Parker, as an institution-community hybrid, including donors and parents, does not exist to maximize its impact on our city, our country, or our planet. Parker is about benefiting its own.

Of course Parker does good things, primarily through giving low-income students resources to join the Parker community, but the good things Parker does still are defined by its community, once the community is defined. Social justice is programmed around exposing members of the community to social justice, not about helping the world in absolute terms.

Parker allocates its resources in terms of what is best, in a holistic sense, for this closed community, not in terms of what is best for all human beings. Thus, as the senior class contemplates what our class gift should be, every single idea generated, besides one about giving money for scholarships, was about improving student life for students who already live at the pinnacle of privilege.

This is not necessarily evil or wrong, but it is, by definition, a Parker First approach, as much as Trump’s foreign policy is an America First approach. All private schools like Parker use their money to give students, most of whom come from families who pay full-tuition, better lives and better opportunities, just as Trump wants to direct American policy to yield benefits first and foremost for Americans.

Private schools often want their students to be good, altruistic citizens, but their wants are always directed towards their students, and their efforts are always about the people their students will become, just as Trump directs his aspirations towards what America can become. In all likelihood, nothing will change in regard to how private schools like Parker are run, but they ought to at least be honest: they put their students first, as much of the world burns.