Obama's Man: Teaching Tomorrow's Terrorists

Barack Obama referred to Bill Ayres, his Chicago buddy and former Weather Underground domestic terrorist, as an "English teacher." Would that it were so! A better phrase would be a "Terror teacher." From Sol Stern in City Journal:

As I have shown elsewhere in City Journal, 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.

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.” 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.

And therefore, the mission of teachers is not to teach children real skills they need in the real world, like math, English and science, which after all are also nothing more than reflections of capitalist hegemony. Ayres is not even bright enough to figure out why capitalism has become the global economic hegemon (because it has proven itself better and more progressive than any other system), yet he is entrusted to teach the teachers of our children.

Does Obama know this? Possibly not, or he wouldn't have referred to Ayers as an English prof in the debate. I'm much more upset about what Bill Ayres says about the state of education in America than I am about what he says about Obama.

Public pressure and a deceitful resume brought down Ward Churchill, who was much less dangerous than Ayres because he didn't teach teachers. Let's take a lesson from Ayres' own playbook and show some struggle, outrage and action to get this #$%@! out of the classroom and banned from influencing future generations.

hat-tip: memeorandum