I don't regret setting bombs, Bill Ayers said. I feel we didn't do enough. Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970s as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings. And he still has the ebullient, ingratiating manner, the apparently intense interest in other people, that made him a charismatic figure in the radical student movement. Now he has written a book, Fugitive Days (Beacon Press, September). Mr. Ayers, who is 56, calls it a memoir, somewhat coyly perhaps, since he also says some of it is fiction. He writes that he participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972. But Mr. Ayers also seems to want to have it both ways, taking responsibility for daring acts in his youth, then deflecting it.
No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen
by Dinitia Smith
September 11, 2001
Bill Ayers, newly elected Vice President for Curriculum of AERA. Membership: 25,000.
Every public school in the nation save one -- Bill Gates' High Tech High in San Diego -- is required to hire teachers trained by these people.
It's time to deregulate the schools.
Set the children free.
Let them have schools & teachers who teach.
During his fugitive years, Mr. Ayers said, he lived in 15 states, taking names of dead babies in cemeteries who were born in the same year as he. He describes the typical safe house: there were usually books by Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara's picture in the bedroom; fermented Vietnamese fish sauce in the refrigerator, and live sourdough starter donated by a Native American that was reputed to have passed from hand to hand over a century.
ReplyDeleteHe sounds like a perfect candidate to influence the curriculum my children are taught in the public schools.
Good grief. You can't make this stuff up.
Deregulation isn't enough--because too many people WANT this garbage. But at least a crowbar away from their goals would be a start.
ReplyDeleteAnd the Gates Foundation has supported a bunch of crap like this, too.
It's hard to root out this many bad ideas. The ed schools needs their funding pulled.
As a parent, I’ve frequently been amazed and befuddled about things I’ve read about our education schools.
ReplyDeleteNow, I feel like I live on a DIFFERENT PLANET than these folks.
The ed schools needs their funding pulled.
ReplyDeleteYes.
Remember Reid Lyon?
First, blow up the ed schools?
This is the kind of thing a sane person comes to after a while.
It's not just parents who live on a different planet, it's other professors. Professors in the liberal arts disciplines hold these people in contempt. There's no other word.
ReplyDeleteThink about Ed's treatment here in Irvington.
Our most doctrinaire administrator actually said to him, when he said he had been a "disciplinary specialist for 25 years," "Have you ever wondered whether that's your problem."
It really can't be said often enough: ed school professors live completely apart from all other professors. They exist inside a "thoughtworld," just as E.D. Hirsch says.
E.D. Hirsch, of course, IS an English professor.
Not an ed school professor.
Note the date on which that story appeared.
ReplyDeleteReally? Professors in lib arts hold these people in contempt?
ReplyDeleteI had the misfortune to be at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley for grad school. I was in Computer Science. This stuff was standard thinking among any professor under the age of 60-- even in the science discipline I was in. It wasn't challenged by anyone or anything. If you sat in on a lib arts class, you heard all of this from the profs. All grad students who TA'd were required to take a "how to teach" seminar and this stuff was the curriculum. That course was taught by a CS phd lecturer, not an ed school person.
But it didn't matter where the profs had come from, or where they were going. This was the lens through which they viewed the world.
This was the lens through which they viewed the world.
ReplyDeleteWe may be talking about two different things.
Are professors in the liberal arts disciplines liberal & left? Yes. Absolutely. Ed considers himself left-liberal, and that's conservative for his realm.
None of these people think that students should discover their own meaning. None of these people would tell you that it serves the interests of disadvantaged kids to be upset about inequality without also being given the knowledge and skills to go to colleges themselves.
That said, I should post the link to the Princeton Charter School story.
In that case, you see a war of professor-against-professor....
yup
I need to get that posted.
Let me put it this way.
Professors in the classic liberal arts disciplines deeply oppose all of this stuff.
Professors in comp lit might conceivably be favorably disposed.
Professors in the "Studies"-type programs (Critical Studies most especially) might be generally sympathetic, although I don't know this to be the case.
One of the reasons Hirsch gives for the pomposity of ed school professors is the extremely low status they hold within the university.
"Deregulation isn't enough--because too many people WANT this garbage."
ReplyDeleteI've come to this conclusion. My views on academic rigor are vastly different from my neighbors or friends, who are quite intelligent, but seemingly apathetic regarding educational standards.
It is amusing and a little bit bewildering at times. I really think some people have lost all common sense.
Yes, Paula, I know exactly what you mean.
ReplyDeleteJust a word in defense of education professors who did not spend their youth planting bombs. I'm a liberal arts (math) professor, and I know a lot of people in education, and I would say that a lot of the people in education are reasonably sensible (this may be because our ed. dept really tries hard to hire people who were once K-12 teachers). They do a lot of good things, though not always the way I would do them, of course. Not all education professors are equally out of touch, (and most of them would not feel comfortable condoning bombing anything).
ReplyDeleteNow, it is also true that many/most of the education professors do have a bad case of education theory (a random quote from I forget where: "professors have theories the way dogs have fleas"). It is almost impossible to avoid catching a case of theory in an education graduate program, I'm afraid, because you have to have a theoretical base for your dissertation. This is true of many programs (my husband did graduate work in English, and it was definitely true there): after 4 or more years of learning about and writing about theoretical stuff, you start to believe your own press. So, some things they handle very well, and others not so much, but it is, in fact, possible to overstate the lack of common sense, even in education departments.
Oh, and most of them probably don't know that Ayers is the VP of AERA--I'm so used to the candidates for offices like that being someone I've never heard of, that I don't even look to see whose running anymore (I'm not a member of AERA, but I have plenty of professional memberships in groups that I'm only vaguely aware of what they do besides sending me a journal once in a while).
I would say that a lot of the people in education are reasonably sensible (this may be because our ed. dept really tries hard to hire people who were once K-12 teachers).
ReplyDeleteOh absolutely.
The problem with ed schools, in my experience, is "absence of instructivism" as much as it is "presence of constructivism."
Remember that post palisadesk wrote a while back about new graduates of ed school having learned only theory & nothing about direct instruction (small letters) or classroom management? Slavin says the same thing in his education textbook.
People like Ayers influence the "theory" that is taught in ed schools; they don't produce bomb-throwing teachers (or ed school professors for that matter).
What I see in schools is the worst of both worlds: young teachers who have absorbed the idea that students should "construct their own meaning" who are at the same time utterly traditional in the bad sense of the term. Teachers here, especially young teachers, are constantly telling even very young children (this is now happening in the 4-5 school) that they are to "take responsibility for their own learning."
They also give lots of tests, grade harshly, and blame the student when he fails to learn.
Also, since they've all been exposed to multiple intelligences, they seem readily to explain failures to learn as brain-based ("weak inferential thinking" and the like).
Would any of these people throw bombs?
No.
Would any of these teachers even know what the phrase "critical pedagogy" meant?
I doubt it.
I want to stress this point!
ReplyDeleteLast year we had a meeting with the middle school principal, who asked me what the NCTM was. He had never heard of the math wars.
I told him the math wars were akin to the reading wars over whole language, and I got the distinct impression he hadn't heard of the reading wars, either, or even of whole language.
That was a classic Different Planets moment. For the middle school principal, there isn't any war. There's "education" and there's PITA parents.
The middle school principal has spent two years now working up a "middle school model" implementation for the middle school here. He was hired to do this; obviously the superintendent plans to implement block scheduling & interdisciplinary teaching at every level of the school district. (At the grade school level, social studies and ELA no longer exist as separate subjects. All assignments are now labeled "social studies/ELA." This means the school can send home ungrammatical pieces of writing whose authors are South American children.)
I doubt that he knows anything about the pros and cons of the middle school model or the controversy that surrounds it. The NMSA says exemplary middle schools have the middle school model & his boss wants it so that's that.
As to whether AERA members know they've just elected William Ayers as VP of curriculum, I'm guessing an awful lot of people are going to be aghast when they figure it out!
ReplyDeleteI'd like to know how many members voted in the election.
I've come to this conclusion. My views on academic rigor are vastly different from my neighbors or friends, who are quite intelligent, but seemingly apathetic regarding educational standards.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely -- though I don't see (many) parents saying they want the middle school model or Trailblazers, etc.
We have a very large group of highly-educated parents who want serious academics. Some of these parents went to private schools themselves, and there's a group of parents who have one child in private school & another child in public.
Parents who aren't as academically oriented just aren't academically oriented. It's not that they want interdisciplinary courses or block scheduling; it's that they don't see the harm.
Also, a lot of them are sick to death of all the state testing.
A friend of ours told us last year that half the people where he lives hate the state tests & the other half are mad that the kids aren't doing better on the state tests, and he never knows from one day to the next which side he's going to be on.
PaulaV,
ReplyDeleteI'm with you on my fears that my peers dont' seem to care what's going on in their kid's classroom when it comes to instruction, and are pleased as punch to have an arts magnet school or a french immersion school or some nice cool feel good SMART boards, etc. I talk to parents who are above average, well educated, and whose children have spent 4 YEARS not learning how to read at the local GATE magnet school, and their response isn't to ask WHAT THE HECK is wrong with the school.
It's why every time I think of starting a priate school, it feels pointless. who would attend? My kids and 6 others? maybe 10?
Btw, are you the person who a few weeks back was worrying about your son being stuck between a rock and a hard place with a Kumon (or equiv) program and also his own classroom math making him so anxious? Feel free to email! I'll post it again for you if you like.
Allison,
ReplyDeleteYes, I posted a few weeks ago and I emailed you, but I didn't hear back. I lost all of my email addresses and had to reload everything so sure I would definitely like your email address again.
What I find most strange is how everyone seems to think simply because we live in an affluent area of the country that we are somehow immune to bad choices. Our county is piloting TERC math investigations, but there has not been one story in the newspaper about the program and how other affluent districts have railed against it. Some of us complained and wrote our board members, but it didn't generate the press.
Sometimes I feel like everyone is on this big sinking ship and there only a few us looking around for the life boats.
Yet, I do believe in American exceptionalism despite how so many take it for granted.
PaulaV,
ReplyDeleteyou can write me at
greifer @ gmail . com
but you should remove the spaces.
I will look to see if my spam filter stole your prior email, as I never received it...