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Ayres on Obama


Real Clear Politics picked up Bill Ayres, drove him around the block and asked the unapologetic terrorist whether he thinks Mr. Obama should be tried for war crimes. The answer, Mr. Ayers said, was “Absolutely!” Mr. Obama has yet to be driven around the block or asked what his current feelings towards Mr. Ayres are.

Mr. Obama has always claimed that his acquaintance with Mr. Ayres was fleeting and unimportant, a characterization some questioned. Their putatively historically “accurate” autobiographies are both larded with fictitious characters and episodes. Mr. Obama recovered politically from his momentary alliance with Mr. Ayres -- the publisher of “Prairie Fire,” a communist manifesto -- who also recovered from his disreputable past. Presently, Mr. Ayres is a celebrated pedagogue, a follower of Paulo Frere, author of “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed," a book that had a certain revolutionary cachet in the post Woodstock era and was thought by some to have ushered in decades of educational destruction.

Comments

Kendall Svengalis said…
If you want to know why American education is in such dire straights, the fact that Ayres is a "celebrated pedagogue" within the educational community speaks volumes. Of course, Paulo Frere is just one of the theorists who have been dumbing down American education since the Progressive era, the whole story of which is told in great detail by Diane Ravitch in her book "Left Back." Looking back over that history, it is no wonder our children have been falling further and further behind their European and Asian counterparts. E.D. Hirsch has also done amazing work in exposing the failures of progressive education, which deemphacized factual content in favor of a whole series of intellectually bankrupt "reforms." Sadly, CT is largely oblivious to what needs to be done to raise academic achievement, which is why more and more parents have been choosing to homeschool their children. For further information, see my annotated bibliography at:
http://www.sensiblechange.org/EducationReadings.pdf
3:24 PM
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