After reading Tex's post about William Ayers and his new post as vice president for curriculum at AERA, I figured I'd like to know, AERA being the association for education research in this country and all.
So I took a look at his blog. I still don't know, but I fear the worst:
Classrooms and schools for democracy and freedom recognize each student as an entire universe, each capable of becoming an author, artist, and activist in his or her own life—teachers in these classrooms assume that every student is an unruly spark of meaning-making energy on a voyage of discovery and surprise. And the best teachers are themselves unruly sparks, also on a voyage, also awakening to the new and moving and in solidarity with, not in service to their students.
That doesn't sound good. Plus he's got a link to Gerald Bracey. Which is a sign.
AERA has 25,000 members?
And these 25,000 members think a practitioner of critical pedagogy should be in charge of curriculum?
Couldn't he be in charge of something else?
Like the social context of education, maybe?
On the other hand, William Ayers may be more open to the concept of kids being in some way exposed to an "academic curriculum" than his predecessor in the post:
By the early 1970s, my local high school had adopted many of the nation’s post-Sputnik educational reforms. In addition to tracking (a legacy of still earlier times), academics were proclaimed the order of the day. Our national security rested on our ability to compete with the Russians, and therefore as adolescents we were told to learn more math, science, and foreign languages. By and large, my upper-middle classmates rose to the occasion. For reasons I still do not entirely grasp, they found a highly academic curriculum interesting and compelling. They were motivated. They were organized. They had binders for every class. They knew how to take tests. They did their homework. They excelled--and I did not.
Yet, I am writing today as a modestly successful academic.
I dunno.
On balance, I prefer Dave. At least he writes well. And he looks like fun.
I know this isn't a political blog, but the reason Ayers speaks this way is because he is a Communist. I don't mean to say that he's generally on the Left. I mean, he's an unrepetant Marxist who thinks the cultural revolution in China was a good thing, who thought the North Vietnamese were a good thing, who thought that Castro's Cuba was a good thing, who thought the Soviet system was a good thing. He thinks that the only lens through which to understand the world is one where the workers are exploited by those who own the means of production, and who thinks that America is the greatest source of evil in the world.
ReplyDeleteDo not read what he says about education without using the filter that explains what the communists think about education, what it's for, what its aims are.
You've got to check out the other guy's web site.
ReplyDeleteI was about to post a link.
I'll have to find that passage Concerned told me about: the one where the Soviet Union imported Discovery Learning & then dumped it.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that Ayers has been elevated to the status of Vice President of AERA ----
ReplyDeleteI'd like to know exactly how this happened.
Where does AERA stand on "critical pedagogy"?
I looked back at Sol Stern:
ReplyDelete"Ayers won the election handily"
I'd like to know who he ran against.
Catherine,
ReplyDeletethat paragraph you highlighted isn't the worst. Not by half. The one before it is so terrible that I finally figured out why drugs should be outlawed.
but it's hard to tell when he's quoting Mclaren and when he's writing. Great example of writing, isn't it?
wow, this is even worse:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.americanthinker.com/2008/04/bill_ayers_and_the_subversion.html
excerpt from above:
How should teachers teach science, for example? According to one of the books, Ayers and Greene approved for publishing,
"The marriages between capitalism and education and capitalism and science have created a foundation for science education that emphasizes corporate values at the expense of social justice and human dignity." The alternative? "Science pedagogy framed around social justice concerns can become a medium to transform individuals, schools, communities, the environment, and science itself, in ways that promote equity and social justice. Creating a science education that is transformative implies not only how science is a political activity but also the ways in which students might see and use science and science education in ways transformative of the institutional and interpersonal power structures that play a role in their lives."
Similar gobblygook applies to the teaching of math. Eric Gutstein teaches with Ayers and, according to Stern, is a Marxist ideologue. He has politicized his math classes and proudly notes that his course has made -- and will make generations of students -- more aware of the injustices built into capitalist society. One way of doing this is by using unequal wealth distribution to teach fractions.
---
These Sol quotes in the Lasky piece were taken from a Different Sol Stern piece on Ayers:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_3_ed_school.html
That piece includes this: One of the leading lights of the genre is Eric Gutstein, a Marxist colleague of Ayers’s at the University of Illinois and also a full-time Chicago public school math teacher. Gutstein’s new book, Reading and Writing the World with Mathematics: Toward a Pedagogy for Social Justice, combines critical pedagogy theory and real live math lessons that Gutstein piloted with his predominantly minority seventh-grade students.
Like Ayers, Gutstein reveres Paolo Freire. He approvingly quotes Freire’s dictum that “there neither is, nor has ever been, an educational practice in zero space-time—neutral in the sense of being committed only to preponderantly abstract, intangible ideas.” Gutstein takes this to mean that since all education is political, leftist math teachers who care about the oppressed have a right, indeed a duty, to use a pedagogy that, in Freire’s words, “does not conceal—in fact, which proclaims—its own political character.”
Accordingly, Gutstein has relentlessly politicized his math classes for years, claiming that this approach has improved his students’ math skills while making them more aware of the injustices built in to capitalist society. One lesson, for example, presents charts showing the U.S. income distribution, aiming to get the students to understand the concept of percentages and fractions, while simultaneously showing them how much wealth is concentrated at the top in an economic system that mainly benefits the superrich. After the class does the mathematical calculations, Gutstein asks: “How does all this make you feel?” He triumphantly reports that 19 of 21 students described wealth distribution in America as “bad,” “unfair,” or “shocking,” and he proudly quotes the comments of a child named Rosa: “Well I see that all the wealth in the United States is mostly the wealth of a couple people not the whole nation.”
--I'll have to find that passage Concerned told me about: the one where the Soviet Union imported Discovery Learning & then dumped it.
ReplyDeleteThat reminds me of the stories about the Soviet spies in the US in the 1930s who were backed by the NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB). They were told that they had to fund their own spying by running businesses. They had to use the profits to fund their little cameras and their copying techniques, for their bribes, etc.
The Soviets are imminently practical, it seems.
"I'll have to find that passage Concerned told me about: the one where the Soviet Union imported Discovery Learning & then dumped it."
ReplyDeleteProbably p234 of "Left Back," by Diane Ravitch:
"... William C. Bagley ... announced with undisguised pleasure in 1933 that the Soviet Union had abandoned progressive education ... he reported that Soviet educational authorities had issued a decree in 1931 sweeping away everything that Dewey, Counts and Kilpatrick had praised. The decree restored classroom recitations, textbooks, discipline, and compulsory examinations. ... The Soviets had abolished progressive education, Bagley thought, because they wanted able, competent men and women, which progressive education could not supply."
-Mark Roulo
Oh I love it!!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Mark!
I can't believe I STILL have not read Left Back.
ReplyDeleteI should be horse-whipped.
Yup.
ReplyDeleteFreire's the man.
So....I wonder how these guys are going to react to the new book attributing "rising inequality" to education.
ReplyDeleteSo....I wonder how these guys are going to react to the new book attributing "rising inequality" to education.
ReplyDeleteI would call THAT an “inconvenient truth”. However, the Ayers crowd might say it shows their work has just begun.
Don't kid yourselves. Rising inequality is good for Communists, so the Communists think, because it makes the proletariat more likely to have an uprising.
ReplyDelete