"It is fair to hold [Barack Obama] responsible for a startling lack of judgment in his choice of mentors, associates, and friends, and for showing a callous disregard for the lives they damaged and the hatred they have demonstrated for this country."-- John M. Murtagh, adjunct professor of public policy at the Fordham University College of Liberal Studies, in City Journal. Mr. Murtagh's family was bombed by the Weathermen.
"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."-- Sol Stern, author of "Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice", making the point that Bill Ayers - a domestic terrorist - is, amazingly, the Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and was "elected vice president for curriculum of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA), the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers". This also came from the wonderful City Journal.
Sorry to say, but Stern's piece on Ayers is histrionic. Stern unloads his venom and prejudice here without much, nay, any solid argumentation. So we get it, yes, that he hates liberals and luuuuves free-market capitalism. Yes, we get that, alright. But not much else on Ayers, other than Stern's accusation that now he inflicts "greater harm (...) on the nation’s schoolchildren" than his domestic terrorist actions did in his youth. Stern also offers this nugget of outraged wisdom:
ReplyDelete"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."
OK... And Stern says it like it's a bad thing? Of course any public school system, in any country, reflects the political and social agendas of the society in which it operates, with any and all warts involved. The US public education is no different. But Stern seems to assume that either this is the good thing, or perhaps it is just wrong to point it out -- I can't quite figure it out. Not to mention that if that was indeed the case -- and it is, as it cannot be otherwise -- the role of the teachers as unquestioning transmitters of the political and moral status quo should at least be debated -- which appears to be what Ayers is doing (sans Stern's hysterical interpretation of his actions as the educator). But, frankly, it's really hard to say what Ayers is doing as an educator nowadays from this piece, since Stern does not offer much "meat" in it. We get more on Stern's biases here than on Ayers's sins.