Critics have taken issue Barack Obama’s relationship with his neighbor, former Weatherman Bill Ayers. But it’s not Ayers radical, bomb-making past that should trouble people, writes Sol Stern in City Journal, but the far greater harm inflicted on the nation’s schoolchildren by the political and educational movement in which Ayers plays a leading role today.
“What [Obama] can be blamed for is not acknowledging that his neighbor has a political agenda that, if successful, would make it impossible to lift academic achievement for disadvantaged children,” Stern writes. “Ayers’s politics have hardly changed since his Weatherman days. He still boasts about working full-time to bring down American capitalism and imperialism. This time, however, he does it from his tenured perch as Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to indoctrinate America’s future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students.”
“Unfortunately, neither Obama nor his critics in the media seem to have a clue about Ayers’s current work and his widespread influence in the education schools,” Stern writes.
There is an issue I have been having with the Core Knowledge Sequence on how it deals with Slavery in America. This issue to taught to the children starting in Kindergarten or 1st grade. It becomes the foundation of how they view themselves. MLK is in the curriculum, but Benjamin Banneker is not. Ancient Egypt is in the early curriculum, but not Modern or Ancient Africa until at least 3rd grade. Nor is the whole history of slavery, that almost every group of people were slaves to another group of people, is not discussed until 5th grade.
There is nothing that talks about how black slaves could not legally get married, but they did have the practice of “hopping on a broom” to signify their commitment to each other. What about the fact that even though they were slaves, families did try to stay together.
Slavery is one issue of their culture, but it should not define their culture. When it does, it leads to people like Wright.