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Thanks to the Huffington Post, unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers has a place to blog. His first post laments Obama's pragmatic choice for Secretary of Education but says it's a better choice that someone a Republican would nominate who would push "teacher accountability", "testing", and actually close bad schools and fire bad teachers. His solution for Obama's pragmatic pick? Protest. Obama is not a monarch -- Arne Duncan is not education czar -- and we are not his subjects. If we want a foreign policy based on justice, for example, we ought to get busy organizing a robust anti-imperialist peace movement; if we want to end the death penalty we better get smart about changing the dominant narrative concerning crime and punishment. We are not allowed to sit quietly in a democracy awaiting salvation from above. We are all equal, and we all need to speak up and speak out right now. Does it bother anyone else that Bill Ayers wants to start up a "robust ant-imperialist peace movement"?No more math and science either. They are just tools of every authoritarian regime. Much of what we call schooling forecloses or shuts down or walls off meaningful choice-making. Much of it is based on obedience and conformity, the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime. Much of it banishes the unpopular, squirms in the presence of the unorthodox, hides the unpleasant. There's no space for skepticism, irreverence, or even doubt. While many of us long for teaching as something transcendent and powerful, we find ourselves too-often locked in situations that reduce teaching to a kind of glorified clerking, passing along a curriculum of received wisdom and predigested and often false bits of information. This is a recipe for disaster in the long run. His first post
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