The William Ayers plan to turn America's schoolchildren into Maoists and how Barack Obama helped him. The following was masterfully researched and sadly, it is not a faerie tale.
Characterizing the Weatherman as "an American Red Army," Ayers summed up the organization's ideology as follows: "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home. Kill your parents." (1)
[In 2006 Ayers] continued to rail against his exclusion from the conference in an interview with the house organ of the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, an interview printed right alongside some of the memorable sayings of the party’s Chairman for Life, Bob Avakian. Ayers complained to the RCP interviewer that the conference organizers were “taking the teeth out of the [progressive education] critique” and trying instead to “present progressive education as something nice and familiar.” (2)
In April 2008 Sol Stern, one of those tiresome ex-Leftists who do penance by ratting out former fellow travelers, dropped a bombshell on New York City's intellectual establishment:
[William] Ayers’s politics have hardly changed since his Weatherman days. He 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.(3)
It gets even more interesting—but here I pause to recount the intellectual establishment's immediate reaction, which to quote Mark Steyn in a somewhat different context, was sprayed coffee, steaming pants and scalded crotches.
Yes, all over Manhattan's Upper West Side cheerful Starbucks assistants ran around mopping latte sprays from laptop screens and handing out wads of paper napkins to customers howling in pain.
It's not as if the intelligentsia didn't already know that William Ayers was bent on transforming American schoolchildren into Manchurian Candidates. That was old news because in 2006 Sol Stern had publicized Ayers's education work.(4) The stunner was that Stern was not going to keep his mouth shut about Ayers during Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign.
Now we'll return to Sol hurling thunderbolts:
Indeed, the education department at the University of Illinois is a hotbed for the radical education professoriate. As Ayers puts it in one of his course descriptions, prospective K–12 teachers need to “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.”
Here I pause to clarify a smoggy term. Just what is "social justice?"
For the tourists, social justice means finding ways to make society more just for all. For William Ayers and other American pedagogical versions of the Weather Underground, social justice 'education' means using every subject taught in public school, including math and science, as a means to teach children that capitalism is evil and that anyone who supports the American way of life is going straight to hell.
Yet as Steve Diamond points out, Ayers and his fellow "authoritarian" Leftists in the teaching profession hide behind the generally understood concept of social justice. "... a meaningless [term] because the minute you challenge advocates of this approach they sound like Mom and Apple Pie liberals."(5)
What exactly is an "authoritarian" Leftist? I plan to write Professor Diamond to ask him that very question. But as near as I can figure, it seems to be his polite term for communists working toward the day when the last capitalist will be strangled to death with the guts of the last lily-livered socialist.
For those of us who've paid no attention to what American education experts have been up to in recent years:
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.
Here I'll pause Sol's narrative, so readers who have seen Barack Obama's most ardent followers can wipe coffee spray from their computer screen.
Yes, it's entirely possible that some of the youngest Obamatons were stuffed full of social justice teachings based on textbooks written by an unrepentant Maoist terrorist.
Better set your coffee away from the computer because we're about to follow Sol Stern into the Twilight Zone:
Unfortunately, neither Obama nor his critics in the media seem to have a clue about Ayers’s current work and his widespread influence in the education schools. In his last debate with Hillary Clinton, Obama referred to Ayers as a “professor of English,” an error that the media then repeated. Would that Ayers were just another radical English professor. In that case, his poisonous anti-American teaching would be limited to a few hundred college students in the liberal arts. But through his indoctrination of future K–12 teachers, Ayers has been able to influence what happens in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of classrooms.
Here, readers who recall my May 6 The truth about Barack Obama's association with William Ayers... may wonder whether Sol is being coy with regard to what Barack Obama knows about William Ayers.
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