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PrintOctober 16, 2008
Sol Stern op-ed on Ayers in Wall Street Journal
Yesterday, we covered the op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that praised William Ayers by liberal author Thomas Frank. Frank referred to the former terrorist as "kind," and "humble."
City Journal editor Sol Stern has a little more honest and realistic appraisal of Mr. Ayers in today's WSJ:
The readings Mr. Ayers assigns to his university students are as intellectually diverse as a political commissar's indoctrination session in one of his favorite communist tyrannies. The 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 Mr. Ayers himself; and "Teaching to Transgress" by bell hooks (lower case), the radical black feminist writer.
Two years ago Mr. Ayers shared with his students a letter he wrote to a young radical friend: "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." (The letter is on his Web site, www.billayers.org.)
America's 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. Mr. Ayers has tried to give the civic culture ideal a coup de grace, contemptuously dismissing it as nothing more than what the critical pedagogy theorists commonly refer to as "capitalist hegemony."
In the world of the Ed schools, Mr. Ayers's movement has established a sizeable beachhead -- witness his election earlier this year as vice president for curriculum of the American Education Research Association, the nation's largest organization of education professors and researchers.
Stern pulls no punches nor does he sugarcoat any of Mr. Ayers' execrable beliefs. Why Frank couldn't be half as honest in his paean to Ayers is indicative of the lengths the left will go to hide the truth about Ayers and his working relationship with the possible next president of the United States. Barack Obama is on a first name basis with a notorious, unrepentant terrorist and educational radical. That is an undeniable fact. And if Obama and the left want to disagree and say that Ayers is really a nice guy and "reformed," why did Obama go to such great lengths to hide his close association with Ayers and downplays the relationship to this day?
I mentioned Mr. Ayers trip to Venezuela yesterday and his appearance with Hugo Chavez, praising the dictator for his "revolutionary" ideas of indoctrinating children into far left ideology. The fact that Obama, as Chairman of the Annenberg project in Chicago, assisted Mr. Ayers in trying to foist this notion on public school kids should, at the very least, beg the question of just what Mr. Obama is talking about when he speaks of "reforming" our schools?
We have yet to get a straight answer. And given Ayers' radical beliefs, it's high time we got one.
