Bill Ayers Decries On-Going Education Reforms in Socialist Magazine

This post was authored by Kyle Olson.

 

Sometimes you just know you’re right – like when you find yourself on the opposite side of a debate with an admitted domestic terrorist.

 

In the July-August 2011 edition of “Monthly Review,” Bill Ayers, along with his brother Rick, wrote the introduction to a series of articles on public education.

 

“Education at the beginning of the twenty-first century is in crisis and contestation. The economic instability of capitalism…has had the effect of further compromising a capitalist educational system already beset with problems.

 

“The hijacking of school reform by neoliberal corporate planners, private foundations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, U.S. government strategists, and conservative-oriented education elites has led to an intensified attack on teachers,

teachers’ unions, teacher education, schools, and the kids themselves.”

 

How dare taxpayers who lack the brain power of a domestic terrorist have the audacity to propose improvements to public education! Instead, let’s leave it up to the unions that have dominated education policy for five disastrous decades to solve the problems. Pure genius!

 

This exemplifies the contempt many educational elites have for us bumpkins. They think we should just send them our children and cross our fingers that they learn how to read, compute basic math and become assets to society.

 

If we question how schools are spending our money, then clearly we hate children.

 

But for people like Ayers, education problems have nothing to do with steadily falling test scores and rising dropout rates. It always comes back to bringing down capitalism and free markets. They believe all education options should be “public,” regardless of how ineffective or

wasteful they are. He doesn’t want the private sector to have anything to do with education, even if it could lend a great deal of help.

 

This is a stubborn ideological position that damns reality and practicality. Bill Ayers and his pals are not the least bit interested in education. They are just boiling over to defend organized labor and attack free enterprise in any forum they can.