Rotting the Country from the Inside
Feb 20, 2013 22:00:59 GMT -5
Post by Michael Downing on Feb 20, 2013 22:00:59 GMT -5
Link via WRSA... One of my greatest regrets is not realizing soon enough the effect of public education on my children.
www.americanthinker.com/2013/02/american_education_rotting_the_country_from_the_inside.html
American Education: Rotting the Country from the Inside
The day after Barack Obama's re-election, unrepentant terrorist-turned-"education reformer" Bill Ayers posted an open letter to the president on his blog, focused on educational matters. Specifically, it was a straw man-filled plea to resist private influences in public education, in the names (naturally) of "freedom" and "democracy."
Perfectly echoing his intellectual forbear, John Dewey, Ayers tells Obama that "[w]hen the aim of education and the sole measure of success is competitive, learning becomes exclusively selfish, and there is no obvious social motive to pursue it." (See my discussion of Dewey's near-identical remarks, and their meaning, here.)
Ayers even concludes his post by citing his hero by name. Reminding Obama of the progressive University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where Ayers, Obama, and "your friend Rahm Emanuel" all sent their own children, he urges Obama to universalize this schooling through the public system, and concludes:
Good enough for you, good enough for the privileged, then it must be good enough for the kids in public schools everywhere -- a standard to be aspired to and worked toward. Any other ideal for our schools, in the words of John Dewey who founded the school you chose for your daughters, "is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy."
In a typical leftist projection, Ayers, one of America's foremost living experts on the methods of destroying a democracy, argues that only by following his prescription may democracy be saved. And, in a perfect parallel of the modern progressive ratchet, in which government causes a problem through regulation and then advocates more regulation as the solution to the problem, Ayers responds to the death of education under the hundred-year influence of Dewey ("the father of modern education") by proposing to salvage the public schools by infesting them with even more Deweyism.
And make no mistake about one point: Ayers is invoking Dewey not merely as a respectable cover for his subversive agenda. Deweyism is his subversive agenda. Ayers and his fellow "reformers" are to Dewey what Lenin was to Marx. Marx was an intellectual who wished to undermine Western civilization. Lenin was a thug who sought to bring Marxist principles into full practice through propaganda, armed revolution, and sophisticated lies. Likewise, Dewey hated American liberty and individualism and wished to undermine them through socialist education. Ayers is Dewey's less civilized, more "practically minded" disciple.
www.americanthinker.com/2013/02/american_education_rotting_the_country_from_the_inside.html
American Education: Rotting the Country from the Inside
The day after Barack Obama's re-election, unrepentant terrorist-turned-"education reformer" Bill Ayers posted an open letter to the president on his blog, focused on educational matters. Specifically, it was a straw man-filled plea to resist private influences in public education, in the names (naturally) of "freedom" and "democracy."
Perfectly echoing his intellectual forbear, John Dewey, Ayers tells Obama that "[w]hen the aim of education and the sole measure of success is competitive, learning becomes exclusively selfish, and there is no obvious social motive to pursue it." (See my discussion of Dewey's near-identical remarks, and their meaning, here.)
Ayers even concludes his post by citing his hero by name. Reminding Obama of the progressive University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where Ayers, Obama, and "your friend Rahm Emanuel" all sent their own children, he urges Obama to universalize this schooling through the public system, and concludes:
Good enough for you, good enough for the privileged, then it must be good enough for the kids in public schools everywhere -- a standard to be aspired to and worked toward. Any other ideal for our schools, in the words of John Dewey who founded the school you chose for your daughters, "is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy."
In a typical leftist projection, Ayers, one of America's foremost living experts on the methods of destroying a democracy, argues that only by following his prescription may democracy be saved. And, in a perfect parallel of the modern progressive ratchet, in which government causes a problem through regulation and then advocates more regulation as the solution to the problem, Ayers responds to the death of education under the hundred-year influence of Dewey ("the father of modern education") by proposing to salvage the public schools by infesting them with even more Deweyism.
And make no mistake about one point: Ayers is invoking Dewey not merely as a respectable cover for his subversive agenda. Deweyism is his subversive agenda. Ayers and his fellow "reformers" are to Dewey what Lenin was to Marx. Marx was an intellectual who wished to undermine Western civilization. Lenin was a thug who sought to bring Marxist principles into full practice through propaganda, armed revolution, and sophisticated lies. Likewise, Dewey hated American liberty and individualism and wished to undermine them through socialist education. Ayers is Dewey's less civilized, more "practically minded" disciple.