Barack Obama, Bill Ayers and Public Education

What are Bill Ayers and Barack Obama teaching children?

While the rest of us were, for the most part, oblivious to Bill Ayers' educational (read: indoctrination) aspirations prior to 2008, those in education—and Chicago, apparently—most certainly were not.

Here's an excerpt from an article published Aug. 8, 2006 by CATO@Liberty:

Take, for example, former Weather Undergroud terrorist Bill Ayers’ attempt to work his communism into the science curriculum through “radical” teacher education:

In 1997, Ayers and his mentor Maxine Greene persuaded Teachers College [Columbia] Press to launch a series of books on social justice teaching, with Ayers as editor and Greene serving on the editorial board (along with Rashid Khalidi, loyal supporter of the Palestinian cause and the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University). Twelve volumes have appeared so far, including one titled Teaching Science for Social Justice.

Teaching science for social justice? Let Teachers College professor Angela Calabrese Barton, the volume’s principal author, try to explain: “The marriages between capitalism and education and capitalism and science have created a foundation for science education that emphasizes corporate values at the expense of social justice and human dignity.” The alternative? “Science pedagogy framed around social justice concerns can become a medium to transform individuals, schools, communities, the environment, and science itself, in ways that promote equity and social justice. Creating a science education that is transformative implies not only how science is a political activity but also the ways in which students might see and use science and science education in ways transformative of the institutional and interpersonal power structures that play a role in their lives.” If you still can’t appreciate why it’s necessary for your child’s chemistry teacher to teach for social justice, you are probably hopelessly wedded to reason, empiricism, individual merit, and other capitalist and post-colonialist deformities.
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Columbia’s Teacher’s College, it is worth emphasizing, is one of the most prestigious and influential schools of education in the U.S. As you’ll see reading Sol Stern’s eye-opening article, Bill Ayres is a man who looks with admiration to the example of tryannical murders like Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, and he would like to get teachers to push their ideology into the science curriculum. Stern goes on to discuss Eric Gutstein, a public school math teacher, who incorporates socialist politics into his math lectures. (emphasis added)

What Barack Obama fails to make clear to Americans is that his platform is socialism—true socialism—and his leadership is steering America straight toward communism. How Barack Obama aligns with Bill Ayers should be very apparent. The goal of the Weather Underground was to transform the U.S. into a communist country. Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn never lost site of that goal, and in his mentor, Maxine Greene, Ayers found a new outlet for continuing his war on America.

Ayers is not teaching just a handful of children, he's gotten deeper to the root of education, cultivating teachers—before they've entered a classroom. Children are now soldiers in of the underground war on America and capitalism.

(Updated 10/14/2008)

Even more disturbing than Ayers' socialism and communist agendas is his support and design of sexual education and "gay" education for children. Linda Harvey writes this about the Bill Ayers "gay agenda" for schools:

In 2007, a group from the American Educational Research Association, or AERA, including Ayers, demanded major accrediting organization for schools, colleges, and departments of education include categories of "social justice, sexual orientation and gender identity" in its standards. Ayers and colleagues called their effort "Call to Action: A RED Campaign for Social Justice and Queer Lives." Ayers, formerly vice president for curriculum of the AERA, was the spokesman on behalf of the effort, calling on the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, or NCATE, to include these categories.

What would an Obama administration do? The record shows that Obama supported Illinois Senate Bill 99 in 2003, which, despite denials by Obama and false claims by the mainstream media, was not a bill to protect children from sexual predators. It was a sweeping, comprehensive sex-education bill that lowered the age of instruction from sixth grade to kindergarten, gutted an abstinence emphasis and prohibited "bias" based on "sexual orientation." The term "sexual predator" is nowhere in the bill, with inappropriate touching by peers included in a laundry list of the many aspects of explicit sex ed.

This post does not even begin to describe the myriad details available on these topics. Please visit the supporting links and follow up with your own research. The bottom line: Bill Ayers and Barack Obama are bad for America, but they are even worse for America's children.

Vote for John McCain. Please.

Source: Pluralism and School Choice (CATO@Liberty, Will Wilkinson, 8/8/2006)