The day after Barack Obama's re-election, unrepentant terrorist-turned-"education reformer" Bill Ayers posted an open letter to the president on his blog, focused on educational matters. Specifically, it was a straw man-filled plea to resist private influences in public education, in the names (naturally) of "freedom" and "democracy."

Perfectly echoing his intellectual forbear, John Dewey, Ayers tells Obama that "[w]hen the aim of education and the sole measure of success is competitive, learning becomes exclusively selfish, and there is no obvious social motive to pursue it." (See my discussion of Dewey's near-identical remarks, and their meaning, here.)

Ayers even concludes his post by citing his hero by name. Reminding Obama of the progressive University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where Ayers, Obama, and "your friend Rahm Emanuel" all sent their own children, he urges Obama to universalize this schooling through the public system, and concludes:

Good enough for you, good enough for the privileged, then it must be good enough for the kids in public schools everywhere -- a standard to be aspired to and worked toward. Any other ideal for our schools, in the words of John Dewey who founded the school you chose for your daughters, "is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy."

In a typical leftist projection, Ayers, one of America's foremost living experts on the methods of destroying a democracy, argues that only by following his prescription may democracy be saved. And, in a perfect parallel of the modern progressive ratchet, in which government causes a problem through regulation and then advocates more regulation as the solution to the problem, Ayers responds to the death of education under the hundred-year influence of Dewey ("the father of modern education") by proposing to salvage the public schools by infesting them with even more Deweyism.

And make no mistake about one point: Ayers is invoking Dewey not merely as a respectable cover for his subversive agenda. Deweyism is his subversive agenda. Ayers and his fellow "reformers" are to Dewey what Lenin was to Marx. Marx was an intellectual who wished to undermine Western civilization. Lenin was a thug who sought to bring Marxist principles into full practice through propaganda, armed revolution, and sophisticated lies. Likewise, Dewey hated American liberty and individualism and wished to undermine them through socialist education. Ayers is Dewey's less civilized, more "practically minded" disciple.

Having laid the groundwork regarding the methods and goals of Ayers and the Weather Underground (WU) in Part 1 of this interview with Larry Grathwohl, we turn now to the significance of this radicalism in today's terms, particularly with regard to modern education.

-snip-

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/02/a...l#ixzz2LSe0iSR4
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While many cite Dewey as the original trouble-starter, the roots of this problem can be traced prior to Dewey:

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"In 1852 when the state of Massachusetts pioneered the first program of public education in America, it decided to borrow as its model the Prussian educational system, the then reigning paradigm of educational discipline and efficiency. The designers of the Prussian system did not share Condorcet's concern with teaching children to think for themselves. The German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, an enthusiastic supporter of the Jacobins during the French Revolution, had been one of the spiritual architects of the Prussian system. Fichte summed up his philosophy of public education by saying: 'If you want to influence [the pupil] at all, you must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will. ... The new education must produce this stable and unhesitating will according to a sure and infallible rule.' This method of teaching no doubt produces the kind of orderly discipline necessary for mass education to work at all, and yet it is also the doctrine of education embraced by all subsequent forms of totalitarian government and eerily prophetic of George Orwell's Newspeak."

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-- Lee Harris, The Next American Civil War, The Populist Revolt against the Liberal Elite

While this may seem to be a small and dusty historical tidbit, it is important to understand that the well was poisoned from the onset. Dewey and his ilk had a sound platform on which to launch their treachery. (BTW, I highly recommend all 3 of Lee Harris' books.)

ABSOLUTELY INDEED

As the quotes here include verification of:

http://twoday.net/static/omega/files/quo...us_subjects.htm

Quote: FP123 wrote in post #2

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While many cite Dewey as the original trouble-starter, the roots of this problem can be traced prior to Dewey:

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Quote: GourmetDan wrote in post #4

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Public school is basically government indoctrination. They teach kids what to think, not how to think. Media carries that forward with the adults, telling them what is news and what to think about it. Brainwashing techniques have gotten very good.

The word 'heresy' "comes from the Greek hairesis, which simply means ‘choice’. The word originally signified making a theological choice beyond the boundaries of mainstream dogma." It has become 'heresy' to question anything taught in school or presented in the mainstream media. People must stop reacting and think first.

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Quote: FP123 wrote in post #5

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Look at "climate change" as a recent example. There was a thread here earlier about how the left is up in arms that some schools may start teaching heretical thinking about the "consensus" on the "proven" science! LOL

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Quote: GourmetDan wrote in post #6

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Quote: FP123 wrote in post #5

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Look at "climate change" as a recent example. There was a thread here earlier about how the left is up in arms that some schools may start teaching heretical thinking about the "consensus" on the "proven" science! LOL

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Exactly proving the point, but you have to be careful. 'The left' is not the only source of condemnation for 'heretics'. The right does the same thing. It is simply human nature and that must be understood before it can be overcome no matter which 'direction' it comes from.

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Quote: FP123 wrote in post #7

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Quote: GourmetDan wrote in post #6

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Quote: FP123 wrote in post #5

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Look at "climate change" as a recent example. There was a thread here earlier about how the left is up in arms that some schools may start teaching heretical thinking about the "consensus" on the "proven" science! LOL

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Exactly proving the point, but you have to be careful. 'The left' is not the only source of condemnation for 'heretics'. The right does the same thing. It is simply human nature and that must be understood before it can be overcome no matter which 'direction' it comes from.

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Yes, totally agree. On this issue the "left-right" false choice paradigm holds up fairly well, except when Republicans start thinking that they may need to "have an open mind on climate change" in order to win an election.

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Quote: Palinista wrote in post #8

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Or immigration reform, increased taxation, entitlement reform, anything and everything. They will always bend and make deals with those across the aisle, because is no aisle. It is them against the people.

The Democrats do not stop pushing their agenda. The Republicans have no agenda, so they adopt the Democrats.

There is no going backwards.

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Quote: Justme wrote in post #9

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I encourage people to send their children to private or parochial schools, and if this is not possible, they should home-educate their children in order to assure that they learn the true history of America and the necessary tools to be a good citizen and be able to contribute and to succeed in our society.

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Isn't this sad?

We were fortunate enough to be able to move when the schools started getting bad in our town. Most are not so lucky.

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Most parents don't care.

We moved from one side of the county to the other because of the schools. We chose the safer and better performing schools.

When I told a parent that this was why we were moving, they said, "You don't know that you won't have the same problems at those schools." They refused to say that drugs swarming the middle school that their child attended was a bridge too far. They WISHED this fate upon my children at the new schools.

Evil and stupidity combined behind what was supposed to be a friendly parental chat about our concerns for our children.