The real problem with Bill Ayers is not that he tried to plant bombs as a Weatherman 40 years ago. It’s his career as an education professor indoctrinating new teachers, writes Sol Stern in City Journal.
(Ayers) still boasts about working full-time to bring down American capitalism and imperialism. This time, however, he does it from his tenured perch as Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to indoctrinate America’s future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students.
. . . Ayers’s texts on the imperative of social-justice teaching are among the most popular works in the syllabi of the nation’s ed schools and teacher-training institutes. One of Ayers’s major themes is that the American public school system is nothing but a reflection of capitalist hegemony. Thus, the mission of all progressive teachers is to take back the classrooms and turn them into laboratories of revolutionary change.
Last month, Ayers was elected vice president for curriculum of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Stern notes. In the bio distributed to voters, Ayers listed his memoir Fugitive Days, which “includes dramatic accounts of how he bombed the Pentagon and other public buildings.”
Via Betsy.
Update: Let’s hope that Barack Obama doesn’t listen to his former pastor’s views on education. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s speech to the NAACP included a recitation of crackpot theories about black-white differences.
. . . in comparing African-American children and European-American children in the field of education, we were comparing apples and rocks.
“European and European-American children have a left brained cognitive object oriented learning style,” Wright said. They’re logical and analytical. African and African-American children are right brained, subject-oriented, creative and intuitive. So whites can learn from reading, because a book is an object, but blacks learn from listening to a person (subject). Blacks descend from story tellers with great memories; whites descend from people who wrote things down. (There’s some Lysenkoism in here.)
That is a different way of learning. It’s not deficient, it is just different.
Golly, let’s stop teaching black kids to read or to think logically and analytically; they’re born to memorize and recite stories and hip hop songs. They have natural rhythm too, says Wright, or at least a different “tonality.” And they clap better. Well, that we knew.
My sister had Ayers as a professor at UIC a couple of years ago. She was told by another ed student that Ayers had a past, but that she shouldn’t look into it until the course was finished or it would ruin the class for her. She took the advice and enjoyed the class. She said Ayers was a lot of fun and had the class to his house for a meal. She also said she didn’t learn much of anything useful in his or any education class she took at UIC.
We’ve been laughing about how her “close association” with Ayers will now preclude her from seeking public office. I mean what does it say about her that she would go to his house and eat his food? Any reasonably, patriotic American would surely have stormed out of his class in disgust - better to take a bad grade than associate with him!
Of course, now she knows what he did and is disgusted by it. She was disgusted by a good deal of what he taught as well. but I bet she’d still eat his food and listen to him talk - apparently he’s a very funny, engaging guy.
apparently he’s a very funny, engaging guy.
Yes, I bet he’s a blast!
I guess this explains certain things.
“Yes, I bet he’s a blast!”
I wonder how many of his jokes are bombs…
That being said, I don’t understand how someone who essentially declared war on the US is allowed to live free within our borders? According to his own tellings of his exploits, he should be holed up in some cave in Pakistan next to Osama.
As for Rev. Wright’s comments, the man has no idea how close he is to effectively justifying all the racist stereotypes of blacks that were used to support slavery.
Bill Ayers! What a card! Sure he wanted to blow things up, kill people and remake the world in his own image, but everybody feels like doing that when he’s only 22 or so. Why hold it against him now? Let’s not rush to judgment about the man. After all, he tells funny jokes and serves great food in between anti-American indoctrination sessions at the taxpayers’ expense. Doesn’t that make up for a lot?
It is gratifying to know that his daily existence is dependent on the nation he would’ve destroyed without a thought, he didn’t accomplish any of the goals he set out to accomplish with his bombs, he’s viewed as an anachronism in the same light as a reconstructed dinosaur - once truly dangerous but now merely an outline, a schematic - and that his greatest accomplishment was to become a member of the bourgeois that he once disdained.
It’s also fitting that he became an ed school prof. He can continue to spout errant nonsense, produce nothing of value, not be held to account for his spoutings or valuelessness and still arrogate to himself the belief that he’s molding the minds of those who’ll be molding the minds of tomorrow’s leaders. And, he’s getting paid to do it when one would think the self-indulgence he’s enjoying would require that he pay the college.
Is this a great country or what?
I believe you meant to write “arrant nonsense”.
It’s weird that Obama mischaracterized Ayers’ field during the ABC debate. Obama should know very well that Ayers is a force in education (I hate to say that he is a Distinguished Professor of Education) since Ayers was deeply involved in the so-called Annenberg Challenge in which Obama played an active role.
There is a lot of background info on the Obama-Ayers role in the Annenberg Challenge here:
http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2008/04/just-fact-check.html
One of the sad facts of human nature is that it is harder to forgive people for being right than it is to forgive people for being wring.
I was born a few weeks after Pearl Harbor. By time I was old enough to notice such things, the WW II pacifists had been forgiven. They were just head-in-the-clouds idealists whose laudable ideals didn’t fit the real world. A pacifist could not have been elected to national office. (Or any office, so far as I know.) But no one was still beating on them 30 years later.
At the time, I thought the Vietnam war was a good idea, for the reasons given at the time. Looking back 30 years later, I see an American jihad, America protecting its state religion — capitalism — from the Marxist hearsay. In any case, the result is that we killed 3 million people for nothing.
The Vietnam war protesters were RIGHT. Those of us — “us” includes me — who acquiesced in the war were WRONG. Naturally, we can’t forgive them.