{"id":431,"date":"2008-04-23T15:40:26","date_gmt":"2008-04-23T19:40:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/?p=431"},"modified":"2018-05-10T09:46:35","modified_gmt":"2018-05-10T14:46:35","slug":"obamas-real-bill-ayers-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/2008\/04\/23\/obamas-real-bill-ayers-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama’s Real Bill Ayers Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

City Journal<\/a><\/p>\n

Barack Obama complains that he\u2019s been unfairly attacked for a casual political and social relationship with his neighbor, former Weatherman Bill Ayers. Obama has a point. In the ultraliberal Hyde Park community where the presidential candidate first earned his political spurs, Ayers is widely regarded as a member in good standing of the city\u2019s civic establishment, not an unrepentant domestic terrorist. But Obama and his critics are arguing about the wrong moral question. The more pressing issue is not the damage done by the Weather Underground 40 years ago, but the far greater harm inflicted on the nation\u2019s schoolchildren by the political and educational movement in which Ayers plays a leading role today.<\/p>\n

A Chicago native son, Ayers first went into combat with his Weatherman comrades during the \u201cDays of Rage\u201d in 1969, smashing storefront windows along the city\u2019s Magnificent Mile and assaulting police officers and city officials. Chicago\u2019s mayor at the time was the Democratic boss of bosses, Richard J. Daley. The city\u2019s current mayor, Richard M. Daley, has employed Ayers as a teacher trainer for the public schools and consulted him on the city\u2019s education-reform plans. Obama\u2019s supporters can reasonably ask: If Daley fils can forgive Ayers for his past violence, why should Obama\u2019s less consequential contacts with Ayers be a political disqualification? It\u2019s hard to disagree. Chicago\u2019s liberals have chosen to define deviancy down in Ayers\u2019s case, and Obama can\u2019t be blamed for that.<\/p>\n

What he can be blamed for is not acknowledging that his neighbor has a political agenda that, if successful, would make it impossible to lift academic achievement for disadvantaged children. As I have shown elsewhere in City Journal<\/a>, Ayers\u2019s 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\u2019s future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students.<\/p>\n

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\u201312 teachers need to \u201cbe 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.\u201d Ayers\u2019s texts on the imperative of social-justice teaching are among the most popular works in the syllabi of the nation\u2019s ed schools and teacher-training institutes. One of Ayers\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, neither Obama nor his critics in the media seem to have a clue about Ayers\u2019s current work and his widespread influence in the education schools. In his last debate with Hillary Clinton, Obama referred to Ayers as a \u201cprofessor of English,\u201d 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\u201312 teachers, Ayers has been able to influence what happens in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of classrooms.<\/p>\n

Ayers\u2019s influence on what is taught in the nation\u2019s public schools is likely to grow in the future. Last month, he was elected vice president for curriculum of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA), the nation\u2019s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers. Ayers won the election handily, and there is no doubt that his fellow education professors knew whom they were voting for. In the short biographical statement distributed to prospective voters beforehand, Ayers listed among his scholarly books Fugitive Days, an unapologetic memoir about his ten years in the Weather Underground. The book includes dramatic accounts of how he bombed the Pentagon and other public buildings.<\/p>\n

AERA already does a great deal to advance the social-justice teaching agenda in the nation\u2019s schools and has established a Social Justice Division with its own executive director. With Bill Ayers now part of the organization\u2019s national leadership, you can be sure that it will encourage even more funding and support for research on how teachers can promote left-wing ideology in the nation\u2019s classrooms\u2014and correspondingly less support for research on such mundane subjects as the best methods for teaching underprivileged children to read.<\/p>\n

The next time Obama\u2014the candidate who purports to be our next \u201ceducation president\u201d\u2014discusses education on the campaign trail, it would be nice to hear what he thinks of his Hyde Park neighbor\u2019s vision for turning the nation\u2019s schools into left-wing indoctrination centers. Indeed, it\u2019s an appropriate question for all the presidential candidates.<\/p>\n

Sol Stern is a contributing editor of City Journal and the author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

City Journal Barack Obama complains that he\u2019s been unfairly attacked for a casual political and social relationship with his neighbor, former Weatherman Bill Ayers. Obama has a point. In the ultraliberal Hyde Park community where the presidential candidate first earned his political spurs, Ayers is widely regarded as a member in good standing of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[36,100,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles-us","category-education","category-school-choice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=431"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7952,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431\/revisions\/7952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}