Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Bill Ayres has become little more than a radical cartoon. Only pedagogues could take him seriously, and his election as 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, suggests they have done so. American education has been deteriorating roughly since early 70’s when Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” became part of the curriculum in teacher’s colleges. Freire’s idea was that the pedagogue or teacher was an oppressive creature so long as he taught his students, for teaching implies the conveyance of ideas or, as Freire would prefer to frame it, propaganda. Learning, however, is a liberating activity. Oppression in the classroom therefore would end when the teacher no longer taught a subject to his students. To become liberators, teachers must become “learning facilitators.” They may shuck off the imputation that they are indoctrinators or prop...

Billy Ayers keeps coming up, like a baby’s warm spittle, over the shoulder of US Sen. and Democrat Party presidential nominee Barack Obama. In the meantime, the diggers, among them blogger ZombieTime, keep digging. Everything you wanted to know about the saintly professor Ayres but were afraid to ask is here: William Ayers' forgotten communist manifesto: Prairie Fire . An excerpt from the manifesto: “We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years… We need a revolutionist communist party to lead the struggle, give coherence and direction to the fight, seize power and build a new society… We have only just begun. At this time, the unity and consolidation of anti imperialist forces is an urgent and pressing strategic necessity. PRAIRIE FIRE is offered as a contribution to this unity of action and purpose. Now it is in your hands. Bernadine Dhorn Jeff Jones Billy Ayres Cecilia Sojourn For The Weather Undergroun...

We know the places where Senator Obama lived as a child, and we know his white grandfather wanted Frank Marshall Davis to be his mentor. We know Davis mentored him from approximately age 14 to 18. We know Davis was a black communist writer and poet. We don’t know the details of what Senator Obama did in Chicago.* We could know more but the University of Illinois, apparently at the instance of Bill Ayers who stored the Annenberg Challenge Project files there, has denied investigator Stanley Kurtz access to those 132 boxes containing 947 files. Obama says he was a “community organizer” in Chicago. The organization for which he community-organized was. The years were probably 1985 to 1988, when he left to attend Harvard Law School. About his relations with Bill Ayers, “domestic terrorist”—the FBI’s characterization—Senator Obama reveals only that he’s that “guy who lives in my neighborhood.” These, then, are the themes of his pre-U.S. Senate experience: community organizin...

We know the places where Senator Obama lived as a child but not why he chose Chicago nor what he has done which bears upon the requirements of president.* Experience? Leadership? Of his activities in Chicago prior to running for the U.S. Senate, he says he was a “community organizer.” The organization for which he community-organized was ACORN. The years were probably 1985 to 1988 when he left to attend Harvard Law School. About his relations with domestic terrorist William Ayers, he revealed only that he’s that “guy who lives in my neighborhood.” These are the themes of his pre-U.S. Senate experience and leadership, community organizing and William Ayers. On community organizing, much is known about ACORN. ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), organized in 1970, physically seized an empty building owned by the City of New York and put squatters in it. The City later gave ACORN the building. The mortgage-giant Fannie Mae between 1980 and 2007 gav...

The Democrat primary campaign, writes Noemie Emery in National Review , certainly is not without irony: “A campaign in which a feminist trailblazer [Geraldine Ferrero, once a Vice Presidential candidate on the Democrat ticket] is called a racist by a post-racial healer [Sen. and would-be president Barack Obama] who indulges a racist bible thumper [the silver tongued Rev. Jeremiah Wright] is a little too strange for their minds to keep up with, but it is the long termed result of the world they created. They never dreamed that the diversity codes they cooked up could snap back and attack them. But they could, and they have.” “We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue,” Obama said some time before he dismissed his pastor as a crank and a demagogue, “just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro in the aftermath of her recent statements as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.” The “some” to whom Obama was referring were Obama backers, ardent Democrats all. Ferraro, who l...

Another associate of Barack Obama, former terrorist now Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Bill Ayers, is shown in an article on him that appeared in Chicago Magazine with a flag rumpled at his feet, a Mona Lisa smile coursing across his face. Ayers, one supposes, is no fan of flag pins. He’s duded up in jeans and a frumpy navy sport coat, the very picture of soi-disant late 60’s early 70’sb, bomb throwing, cop hating, marriage scorning, pot smoking, authority questioning, radical underground revolutionary whose Daddy was a wealthy capitalist. Sol Stern in City Journal writes that Ayers is highly influential among the nation's educators: "Ayers’s texts on the imperative of social-justice teaching are among the most popular works in the syllabi of the nation’s teacher-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. Thu...