Education: An American Problem. Bill Ayers, Radical Education Project, 1968, ASIN B0007H31HU OCLC 33088998
FORMALIZED INOCULATION WITH THE progressive virus began in the 1960s in universities across the country. When those college grads entered the marketplace, they brought with them their infection. They spread the infection to everyone they came in contact with. As they matured and took leadership roles in public schools and government, those same institutions became breeding grounds and indoctrination camps for the progressive virus.
Social engineering became job number one for those progressives dedicated to revolution. The handiwork of these social engineers was dedicated to creating a generation of Americans who possessed artificially high self-esteem, were self-obsessed and who were cultivated within a judgment free environment. Reading, writing and arithmetic took a back seat to the imposition of multiculturalism, amorality, lack of discipline and the promotion of self-assertion. The anxious and insecure student of the 50s was replaced with the cocky, high esteemed and self-assertive student who was no longer subordinate to the institution or his teacher and behaved more like a peer, with equal power and authority.
Entitlement became the norm among public school students. They were entitled to have their say, do their own thing, were provided a million and one excuses for their inability to write, speak and do math. They were entitled to their own mispronunciations, were entitled to dress virtually any way they so desired and were entitled to a discipline and judgment free environment. Discipline went right out the door along with traditional values. Boys and girls were homogenized and taught to disregard gender differences because those feelings were characterized as nothing but a reflection of gender oppression. Middle school children acted like adults but with none of the responsibilities.
Sexual behavior in middle school is a good indicator of the presence of the progressive virus in action. Laura Session Stepp researched the incidence of oral sex in middle school. Writing for the Washington Post in an investigative article that appeared in the summer of 1999, Ms. Stepp interviewed Michael Schaeffer, a supervisor for health education in Prince George’s County, Maryland, for the past 15 years. Schaeffer told Stepp that “It (referring to oral sex) is now the expected minimum behavior.” Deborah Roffman, a human sexuality consultant to 15 schools in the Baltimore-Washington corridor, was also quoted by Stepp, “I’ve been teaching in schools for 30 years. I am receiving an increasing number of inquiries about incidents of oral sex among young adolescents, both at parties and occasionally at school.” {39}
Patricia Hersch is the author of the book A Tribe Apart: A Journey Into the Heart of American Adolescence. She wrote this:
“To me, oral sex was more intimate than intercourse. Kids today absolutely don’t see it that way. It’s done commonly, with a shrug. It’s part of the grab bag of sexual activities.” {40}
Bill Ayers, writer and educator and someone who has had a profound impact on teaching teachers, described his blueprint for public education in America:
“I began teaching when I was 20 years old in a small freedom school affiliated with the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. The year was 1965, and I’d been arrested in a demonstration. Jailed for ten days, I met several activists who were finding ways to link teaching and education with deep and fundamental social change. They were following Dewey and DuBois, King and Helen Keller who wrote: “We can’t have education without revolution. We have tried peace education for 1,900 years and it has failed. Let us try revolution and see what it will do now.”{41}
Ayers is a prolific writer whose works are designed to indoctrinate and infect teachers in training with the progressive virus. It is more likely than not that your children’s public school teachers have been indoctrinated with Mr. Ayer’s writings.
Education: An American Problem. Bill Ayers, Radical Education Project, 1968, ASIN B0007H31HU OCLC 33088998
Hot town: Summer in the City: I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more, Bill Ayers, Students for a Democratic Society, 1969, ASIN B0007I3CMI
Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, Billy Ayers, Celia Sojourn, Communications Co., 1974, ASIN B000GF2KVQ OCLC 1177495
The Good Preschool Teacher: Six Teachers Reflect on Their Lives, William Ayers, Teachers College Press, 1989, ISBN 978-0-8077-2946-5
To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, William Ayers, Teachers College Press, 1993, ISBN 978-0-8077-3262-5
To Become a Teacher: Making a Difference in Children’s Lives, William Ayers, Teachers College Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0-8077-3455-1
City Kids, City Teachers: Reports from the Front Row, William Ayers (Editor) and Patricia Ford (Editor), New Press, 1996, ISBN 978-1-56584-328-8
A Kind and Just Parent, William Ayers, Beacon Press, 1997, ISBN 978-0-8070-4402-5
A Light in Dark Times: Maxine Greene and the Unfinished Conversation, Maxine Greene (Editor), William Ayers (Editor), Janet L. Miller (Editor), Teachers College Press, 1998, ISBN 978-0-8077-3721-7
Teaching for Social Justice: A Democracy and Education Reader, William Ayers (Editor), Jean Ann Hunt (Editor), Therese Quinn (Editor), 1998, ISBN 978-1-56584-420-9
Teacher Lore: Learning from Our Own Experience, William H. Schubert (Editor) and William
C. Ayers (Editor), Educator’s International Press, 1999, ISBN 978-1-891928-03-1
Teaching from the Inside Out: The Eight-Fold Path to Creative Teaching and Living, Sue Sommers (Author), William Ayers (Foreword), Authority Press, 2000, ISBN 978-1-929059-02-7
A Simple Justice: The Challenge of Small Schools, William Ayers, Teachers College Press, 2000, ISBN 978-0-8077-3963-1
Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment, William Ayers (Editor), Rick Ayers (Editor), Bernardine Dohrn (Editor), Jesse L. Jackson (Author), New Press, 2001, ISBN 978-1-56584-666-1
A School of Our Own: Parents, Power, and Community at the East Harlem Block Schools, Tom Roderick (Author), William Ayers (Author), Teachers College Press, 2001, ISBN 978-0-8077-4157-3
Refusing Racism: White Allies and the Struggle for Civil Rights, Cynthia Stokes Brown (Author), William Ayers (Editor), Therese Quinn (Editor), Teachers College Press, 2002, ISBN 978-0-8077-4204-4
On the Side of the Child: Summerhill Revisited, William Ayers, Teachers College Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0-8077-4400-0
Bill Ayers must have mellowed over the years, yes? In 2001 Ayers told Chicago Magazine that he had no regrets, and urged children to “kill your parents.” {42} In the same year Ayers urged children to “kill your parents,” he worked as an editor, along with his wife Bernadine Dohrn, on a book written for public school teachers and administrators entitled: Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment. One has to wonder about Ayer’s motive underlying his push to remove all forms of punishment from public schools given his command to children, “kill your parents.”
All of Ayer’s writings are peppered with revolutionary themes. He and his wife promote the “collective” over rugged individualism and never miss an opportunity to skewer America’s founding fathers. To say that Mr. Ayers and his wife despise traditional America would be an understatement. The fact that Ayers managed to infiltrate America’s public schools was an act of brilliance on his part and an act of abject stupidity on the part of traditional America. Who was guarding the doors to the schoolhouse?
Ayer’s attraction to the progressive virus derives from his awareness of how he can use the symptoms of a progressive virus infection to foment revolution. Likewise, Bernadine Dohrn, has not minced words when it comes to her real and final purpose:
“The majority of people who are activists have stayed the course in a way, in a variety of ways. Devoted to overthrowing everything hateful about this government and corporate structure that we live in. Capitalism itself, herself...himself.”{43}
Think that Ms. Dohrn has been marginalized because of her overt desire to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a socialist, Marxist system? Think again, Ms. Dohrn is a professor at Northwestern University.
Bernadine Dohrn’s life has mirrored that of Simon de Beauvoir, including drug experimentation, affiliations with anarchist groups, hatred of capitalism and close identification with feminism and lesbian issues. Dohrn is an avowed anti-American revolutionary who has written books and given lectures designed to infect her audience with the progressive virus.
What should be disconcerting is that most parents have absolutely no idea that avowed progressive revolutionaries have infiltrated America’s public school system and have been, since the 1960s, infecting children and their teachers with their poisonous vaccine. Is it any wonder that a half-century later America is in the throes of a virulent progressive virus epidemic?
Is it mere coincidence that the provenance of the current power brokers in Washington are directly linked to Ayers, Dohrn, et al? In a well-researched and sourced article appearing in The Blaze, that provenance was outlined:
“BERNARDINE DOHRN: She outranked her husband Ayers in the early SDS hierarchy, serving as one of 10 National Committee members and the only woman. Dohrn, Ayers and Jeff Jones created the splinter Weather Underground where an FBI informant testified the trio was willing to kill the 25 million Americans they expected to resist their planned overthrow of U.S. capitalism. Then-FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover called Dohrn “the most dangerous woman in America.”
Dohrn and Michelle Obama both worked at Chicago’s Sidley Austin law firm in 1988. Barack Obama, Dohrn and Ayers appeared together at several community events, including one organized by Mrs. Obama in her post at the University of Chicago. Today, Dohrn, an associate professor of law at Northwestern University and founder of its Children and Family Justice Center, supports the 150 “New SDS” chapters in U.S. high schools, colleges and universities, writing, “This is the power and the inspiration of a vast, Left umbrella network with variety and vigor.” {44}
To understand Ayer’s, Dohrn’s and their cohort’s primary motivation in promoting progressive dogma one only need to look at this introduction to a speech Ayers gave to the World Economic Forum in Caracas, Venezuela in 2006:
“President Hugo Chavez, Vice-President Vicente Rangel, Ministers Moncada and Isturiz, invited guests, comrades. I’m honored and humbled to be here with you this morning. I bring greetings and support from your brothers and sisters throughout North America. Welcome to the World Education Forum! Amamos la revolucion Bolivariana!”{45} (Emphasis added)
Ayers exhibited a classic pattern of those infected with the progressive virus. When hopeful, Ayers was active in Marxist groups and espoused socialist doctrinaire. When confronted with the inevitable despair that comes from the progressive virus, he chose anarchy and rebellion.
As a “Weatherman,” Ayers attempted to bomb his way to a Marxist revolution. His despair and embrace of anarchy lifted once he recognized that he could use the progressive virus dogma to effectuate the revolution if he were only patient and infiltrated government institutions. He chose public education to practice his craft. Because of the progressive virus, public education was like a bank vault with no door and no guard. Ayers and his fellow comrades walked right in and changed public education’s DNA. Ayers targeted teachers and became a very successful purveyor of and user of the progressive virus.
In April of 2012 Ayers spoke to the Occupy Wall Street Crowd in Chicago, Illinois. Ayers took questions from the crowd. One person asked him how he deals with criticism, here is what he said:
“I get up every morning thinking, today I’m gonna make a difference. Today I’m gonna end capitalism. Today I’m gonna make a revolution. I go to bed every night disappointed, but I’m back again tomorrow. That’s the only way you can do it.” {46}
The clinical transformation of the 60s generation into the progressives we see today is seemingly stunning. The 60s generation rebelled against any authority, and especially against anyone imposing their will upon them. They transformed into intolerant and tyrannical martinets who are intent upon forcing their will on their fellow citizens.
Such a transformation is only stunning if one fails to comprehend what the 60s revolutionaries were all about. The 60s crowd was comprised of the same nascent tyrannical progressives we see today, but their behavior was shrouded within the cloaking garb of “peace, love and long hair.” Hippies were passive-aggressive, but they were still aggressive. Their rebellion and self-indulgence was tempered and not fully realized because the progressive virus had not yet overwhelmed their native culture. Once it had, they became who they always were: Self-obsessed narcissists intent upon having things their way.