The Obama Ayers education agenda

Ronald Radosh:

THE Obama campaign hotly denies the McCain camp's charges that Barack Obama has long ties to Bill Ayers, the 1960s Weather Underground terrorist. I'll leave it to others to discuss most aspects of the relationship - and focus on one damning admission made in Obama's defense.

While denying any other meaningful link between the two, the Obama campaign says that Obama has long respected Ayers' work on education; many press accounts refer to him as a "school reformer." Problem is, those "school reforms" boil down to propagandizing for the very ideas that led Ayers to blow up buildings decades ago.

The Obama defense cites the likes of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who told The New York Times that Ayers (now a University of Illinois professor) is an educator who has "done a lot of good in this city and nationally." Thus, if Obama sought Ayers' expertise on his chosen field of childhood education, it was hardly anything to be wary of.

But, as Stanley Kurtz and Sol Stern have pointed out, Obama helped deliver thousands of dollars to fund Ayers' education projects in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge - whose purpose, says Kurtz, is to infuse students "with a radical political commitment."

Ayers makes this very clear in all his writings. K-12 teachers, he has written, must teach "for social justice and liberation" - making classrooms into centers for creating revolutionary change.

Time has only hardened Ayers' views. Consider an interview he gave two years ago to "Revolution," a magazine published by The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, a self-described "Marxist, Leninist, Maoist" group.

There, Ayers argues that education can't be separated from "the concept of politics and political change." Urban schools are now merely preparing students "for prison, for unemployment and for war."

So, to create a genuine "progressive" education for our children, teachers must work to overturn the repressive, racist and imperialist system that governs the United States; it is imperative to fight "the most reactionary cabal of ideologues" that control the federal government and the media.

...

I am surprised Obama's weird ideas about education did not come up during the primaries and I am also surprised that more attention has not been focused on them since the conventions. They deserve an ad of their own.