Well, yes. That pretty much sums it up.
Posted on 10/10/2008 3:14:21 PM PDT by neverdem
Forget he was terrorist for a moment. Bill Ayers’ Annenberg Challenge provided Barack Obama with sole executive experience before heading his own presidential campaign and his most extensive venture into educational reform. Sol Stern tells us something about Ayers as a school reformer:
Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer. . . For instance, at a November 2006 education forum in Caracas, Venezuela, with President Hugo Chávez at his side, Ayers proclaimed his support for “the profound educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chávez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . . I look forward to seeing how you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.” Ayers concluded his speech by declaring that “Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education—a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation,” and then, as in days of old, raised his fist and chanted: “Viva Presidente Chávez! Viva la Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta la Victoria Siempre!”. . .
Ayers’s school reform agenda focuses almost exclusively on the idea of teaching for “social justice” in the classroom. This has nothing to do with the social-justice ideals of the Sermon on the Mount or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Rather, Ayers and his education school comrades are explicit about the need to indoctrinate public school children with the belief that America is a racist, militarist country and that the capitalist system is inherently unfair and oppressive.
So even if Obama is never queried on whether he was the only adult in Chicago unaware of Ayers’s Weather Underground background, shouldn’t someone ask why he was working for and helping to fund an organization which supported this type of curriculum? Again, perhaps he wasn’t paying attention, or they never mentioned all this in his presence, or Obama figured out it was all a bunch of bunk, but it seems it is an area worth exploring. After all, the media spent weeks puzzling over whether Palin wanted to teach creationism in schools. (For the umpteenth time, she doesn’t.) Don’t we get to know if Obama wanted to teach Marxism?
Meanwhile, Ayers is the darling of my one prof who keeps talking about how great he is....
“profound educational reforms” = SOCIALIST INDOCTRINATION
Well, yes. That pretty much sums it up.
Does he like Timothy McVey also?
I would have never graduated from college if I had to put up with this vomit.....
You should ask for your tuition $$ back!
Why do you think he is ASHAMED to talk about it...His biggest executive position, and NOBODY ask him any questions!!!!
Don’t even get me started. I made an issue of it with my professor but she keeps bringing it up in class so I just ignore her now. I am going to school to become a teacher and I’ve actually been a little depressed about it but it’s making me so fired up that I want to teach more now than ever to counteract all the idiots they’re churning out.
The kids are like little automatons. They all think progressivism and existentialism is the way to go as far as teaching philosophies are and some of them even like social reconstructionism - this is the kind of stuff Ayers and his ilk are promoting.
I am going to be the fish swimming against the current for sure.
I must tell you it is EXTREMELY difficult. It is not only depressing but I find myself getting very angry sometimes.
I am so happy I am going to college now at age 50. If I was young and vulnerable, I might have gone the way my poor brother did 30 years ago - he went in a nice Christian boy and came out a socialist - he used to get all these really wacko commie newspapers and I was having a fit....
She?
Do you know what she said to me? I told her Ayers should be in prison and she said she didn’t agree with what he had done but that he has a “lot of good things to say” and he has done a “lot of good work.” I told her that if Hitler was alive and had done some good stuff, it still wouldn’t cancel out everything else and that you have to look at the accomplishments as a whole.
And the kicker is that Ayers who no longer builds bombs just tries to accomplish his very same goals via indoctrination.
The only change in the Ayers of today from the Ayers of the 60s and 70s is in his tactics.
This article from 2006 by Sol stern absolutely astounds me!
http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_3_ed_school.html
With his Teachers College credential in hand, Ayers landed an ed-school appointment back in Chicago, where his father was CEO of Commonwealth Edison and nicely plugged in to the city’s political establishment. These days, Ayers carries the joint titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. One of his several books on the moral imperative of teaching for social justice is a bestseller in ed-school courses. Like many other tenured and well-heeled radicals, Ayers keeps hoping for a revolutionary upheaval that will finally bring down American capitalism and imperialism. But now, instead of planting bombs in bathrooms, he has been planting the seeds of resistance and rebellion in America’s future teachers, who will then pass on the lessons to the students in their classrooms.
Future teachers signing up for Ayers’s course “On Urban Education” can read these exhortations from the course description on the professor’s website:
“Homelessness, crime, racism, oppression—we have the resources and knowledge to fight and overcome these things.”
“We need to look beyond our isolated situations, to define our problems globally. We cannot be child advocates . . . in Chicago or New York and ignore the web that links us with the children of India or Palestine.”
“In a truly just society there would be a greater sharing of the burden, a fairer distribution of material and human resources.”
For another course, titled “Improving Learning Environments,” Ayers proposes that teachers “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.”
The readings that Ayers assigns are as intellectually stimulating and diverse as a political commissar’s indoctrination session in one of his favorite communist tyrannies. The reading list for his urban education course includes the bible of the critical pedagogy movement, Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed; two books by Ayers himself; another by bell hooks, a radical black feminist writer and critical race theorist; and a “Freedom School” curriculum. That’s the entire spectrum of debate.
For students who might get bored with the purely pedagogic approach to liberation, Ayers also offers a course on the real thing, called “Social Conflicts of the 1960’s.” For this class Ayers also posts his introduction to the soon-to-be-published collection of Weather Underground agitprop that he edited with Dohrn—called, with no intended parody, Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements and Communiqués of the Weather Underground, 1970-1974. “Once things were connected,” Ayers’s introduction recollects, “we saw a system at work, we were radicalized, we named that system—imperialism—and forged an idea of how to overthrow it. We were influenced by Marx, but we were formed more closely and precisely by Che, Ho, Malcolm X, Amílcar Cabral, Mandela—the Third World revolutionaries—and we called ourselves small ‘c’ communists to indicate our rejection of what had become of Marx in the Soviet Block [sic]. . . . We were anti-authoritarian, anti-orthodoxy, communist street fighters.”
Ayers makes clear that his political views haven’t changed much since those glory days. He cites a letter he recently wrote: “I’ve been told to grow up from the time I was ten until this morning. Bullshit. Anyone who salutes your ‘youthful idealism’ is a patronizing reactionary. Resist! Don’t grow up! I went to Camp Casey [Cindy Sheehan’s vigil at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas] in August precisely because I’m an agnostic about how and where the rebellion will break out, but I know I want to be there and I know it will break out.”
America’s historical ideal of public schooling as a means of assimilating all children (and particularly the children of new immigrants) into a common civic and democratic culture is already under assault from the multiculturalists and their race- and gender-centered pedagogy. Now Ayers and his social justice movement, by dismissing the civic culture ideal as nothing more than “capitalist hegemony,” subvert the public schools even further—while subsidized by the taxpayers, including the capitalists who supposedly control the schools.
And it’s not just from his government-funded outpost at the University of Illinois that Ayers is spreading the word about radical social justice teaching. He maintains a busy lecture schedule at other ed schools around the country, and he does teacher training and professional development for the Chicago public schools. All that still leaves him enough time to give nostalgic lectures on college campuses about his Weather Underground experiences.
He also turns up from time to time as a guest lecturer at Teachers College, where he gets a hero’s welcome...
And it goes on and on showing how he has infected Teachers’ Ed colleges all across the country and of course from there school programs and cirricula.
It is interesting that in his acceptance speech at Denver, Obama claims he is going to recruit “an army of new teachers” to improve the state of education in the public schools. Where is he going to find this “army” but in these very colleges that are teaching Ayers’ dogma. This is what you get from a socially acceptable but unrepentant communist domestic terrorist!
Believe me, they’re ALL Marxists. I work at a College, I know.
(Not me - and, the students find me “odd” for being pro-free markets. They find it interesting... }
:)
profound educational reforms” = SOCIALIST INDOCTRINATION
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
“profound education reforms” - COMMUNIST INDOCTRINATION.
It is time we use the words that fit: COMMUNIST and MARXIST!
I knew a teacher who went to the national NEA conference one year and came home and resigned from NEA. She said it was the most disgusting thing she had ever experienced.
There’s always a “remnant.” (ha ha). I have a friend who was dear to me - we are still friends but not as close though - she got a job working in a college in 1992 - she’s in the administrative end. It took awhile but she’s a total nutjob now - it’s pathetic.
Hey, thanks for that. I appreciate the link as well as the comments. I am always heartened at the intelligence on FR as well as how collectively informed we are. Most people are clueless about, well about almost everything.
I had a friend tell me she had to write a paper on a controversy - this was a few months back - and I suggested the Tibet issue which was a hot news item then. She asked me what was happening in Tibet. I couldn’t believe it.
With all of the media outlets available - print (newspaper and magazine), radio, television, cable, internet, how can so many people be so completely and pathetically ignorant???
Got a tag out of it - thanks for the ping.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.