Flashback: Bill Ayers declares education “the motor-force of revolution”
I thought this would be a useful refresher as President Obama’s September 8 junior lobbyist recruitment speech approaches. It’s his Chicago pal Bill Ayers’ 2006 speech at the World Economic Forum in Caracas, Venezuela.
You can separate Obama from radical Ayers’ neighborhood. But you can’t separate Ayers’ radicalism from Obama.
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 Northamerica. Welcome to the World Education Forum! Amamos la revolucion Bolivariana!
This is my fourth visit to Venezuela, each time at the invitation of my comrade and friend Luis Bonilla, a brilliant educator and inspiring fighter for justice. Luis has taught me a great deal about the Bolivarian Revolution and about the profound educational reforms underway here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution, and I’ve come to appreciate Luis as a major asset in both the Venezuelan and the international struggle—I look forward to seeing how he and all of you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane. Thank you, Luis, for everything you’ve done.
I also thank my youngest son, Chesa Boudin, who is interpreting my talk this morning and whose book on the Bolivarian revolution has played an important part in countering the barrage of lies spread by the U.S. State Department and the corrupted Northamerican media.
On my last trip to Caracas I spoke of traveling to a literacy class—Mission Robinson— in the hills above the city along a long and winding road. As we made our way higher and higher, the talk turned to politics as it inevitably does here, and someone noted that the wealthy—here and everywhere, here and in the US surely—have certain received opinions, a kind of absolute judgment about poor and working people, and yet they have never traveled this road, nor any road like it. They have never boarded this bus up into these hills, and not just the oligarchy or the wealthy—this lack of first-hand knowledge, of open investigation, of generous regard is also a condition of the everyday liberals, and even many of the radicals and armchair intellectuals whose formulations sit lifeless and stifling in a crypt of mythology about poor people. Everyone should come and travel these roads into the hills, we agreed then—and not just once, but again and again and again – if they will ever learn anything of the real conditions of life here, surely, but more important than that, if they will ever encounter the wisdom and experience and insight that lives here as well.
We arrived at eight o’clock to a literacy circle already underway being conducted in a small, poorly-lit classroom. And here in an odd and dark space, a sun was shining: ten people had pulled their chairs close together—a young woman maybe 19, a grandmother maybe 65, two men in their 40s—each struggling to read. And I thought of a poem called A Poor Woman Learns to Write by Margaret Atwood about a woman working laboriously to print her name in the dirt. She never thought she could do it, the poet notes, not her– this writing business was for others. But she does it, prints her name, her first word so far, and she looks up and smiles— for she did it right.
The woman in the poem—just like the students in Mission Robinson—is living out a universal dialectic that embodies education at its very best: she wrote her name, she changed herself, and she altered the conditions of her life. As she wrote the word, she changed the world, and another world became—suddenly and surprisingly—possible.
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.”
I walked out of jail and into my first teaching position—and from that day until this I’ve thought of myself as a teacher, but I’ve also understood teaching as a project intimately connected with social justice. After all, the fundamental message of the teacher is this: you can change your life—whoever you are, wherever you’ve been, whatever you’ve done, another world is possible. As students and teachers begin to see themselves as linked to one another, as tied to history and capable of collective action, the fundamental message of teaching shifts slightly, and becomes broader, more generous: we must change ourselves as we come together to change the world. Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large. La educacion es revolucion!
I taught at first in something like a Simoncito—called Head Start—and eventually taught at every level in barrios and prisons and insurgent projects across the United States. I learned then that education is never neutral. It always has a value, a position, a politics. Education either reinforces or challenges the existing social order, and school is always a contested space – what should be taught? In what way? Toward what end? By and for whom? At bottom, it involves a struggle over the essential questions: what does it mean to be a human being living in a human society?
Totalitarianism demands obedience and conformity, hierarchy, command and control. Royalty requires allegiance. Capitalism promotes racism and militarism – turning people into consumers, not citizens. Participatory democracy, by contrast, requires free people coming together voluntarily as equals who are capable of both self-realization and, at the same time, full participation in a shared political and economic life.
Education contributes to human liberation to the extent that people reflect on their lives, and, becoming more conscious, insert themselves as subjects in history. To be a good teacher means above all to have faith in the people, to believe in the possibility that people can create and change things. Education is not preparation for life, but rather education is life itself ,an active process in which everyone— students and teachers– participates as co-learners.
Despite being under constant attack from within and from abroad, the Bolivarian revolution has made astonishing strides in a brief period: from the Mission Simoncito to the Mission Robinson to the Mission Ribas to the Mission Sucre, to the Bolivarian schools and the UBV, Venezuelans have shown the world that with full participation, full inclusion, and popular empowerment, the failings of capitalist schooling can be resisted and overcome. Venezuela is a beacon to the world in its accomplishment of eliminating illiteracy in record time, and engaging virtually the entire population in the ongoing project of education.
The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote a poem to his fellow writers called “The Poet’s Obligation” in which he instructed them in their core responsibility: you must, he said, become aware of your sisters and brothers who are trapped in subjugation and meaninglessness, imprisoned in ignorance and despair. You must move in and out of windows carrying a vision of the vast oceans just beyond the bars of the prison– a message of hope and possibility. Neruda ends with this: it is through me that freedom and the sea will call in answer to the shrouded heart.
Let those of us who are gathered here today read this poem as “The Teacher’s Obligation.” We, too, must move in and out of windows, we, too, must build a project of radical imagination and fundamental change. Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education– a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation. This World Education Forum provides us a unique opportunity to develop and share the lessons and challenges of this profound educational project that is the Bolivarian Revolution.
Viva Mission Sucre!
Viva Presidente Chavez!
Viva La Revolucion Bolivariana!
Hasta La Victoria Siempre!
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Categories: Bill Ayers,Education
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As I said in another post, Conservatives who send their kids to public school teachers for their education should not be surprised when their kids come home as liberals!!
My 6th grade teacher in Tacoma, WA, knew this back in 1963 and warned all the kids in his class of this communist strategy. I never forgot his admonitions and have seen them all come to pass.
Seems Old Joe McCarthy was right.
RedDog, forty years ago, my seventh grade science teacher accused my parents of “polluting the planet” by having twelve children. I’ll never forget the choice words my Dad, the former drill instructor, gave my teacher. The signs have been all around us for decades. The 60s radicals cut their hair and went to work in the schools and the government.
the 60s radicals teach at colleges
For the umteenth time…. we can’t beat the communists and their collaborators in the nickle and dime battles – it is simply spitting in the wind. We must have radical constitutional reforms at the state and federal level to restrict governmental power and influence, primarily by restricting their access to taxpayer money and property. We’ve got to cage the beast, then it can roar all it pleases to little effect.
With the recent news of homeschool and private school acedemic superiority, we should be able to eventually break the government stranglehold on the education system. Even inner city kids can be freed from the public school tar pit. Then liberalism and it’s parent communism will truly rot from the inside out.
Get your subscriptions here:
http://www.radicalteacher.org/about.asp
7thson: You must have lived in California if the teachers were that aggressive back then. Political and bureaucratic incompetence led us to this place.
Ayers was correct in deducing that America’s achilles heel was the minds of it’s children. If we are to recover and save the country, it will take a complete reform of the Edu system and generations of time.
You are correct, sir!
Does anyone remember that great Ted Kennedy idea…Bussing?? Back in the 70′s they passed this brilliant law to take inner city kids and bus them to the ‘burbs, and take ‘burb kids and bus them to the inner cities, in the interest of equality of education. All it succeeded in doing was force kids to spend hours of every day on a bus, go to communities not their own, and force their parents to travel to strange areas to PTA and when their child needed to be picked up. It also killed a lot of community activities, and even some communities. When we bought our home in 1972, a big consideration was that it was 2 blocks from an elementary school. And, we paid taxes for THAT school, not some shoddy school in a very bad neighborhood. Anyway, the bussing crap did not get to our school, thank God, and it only lasted a very short time before the “unintended consequences” were realized. The liberals never think ahead to what their great ideas actually produce…more problems than we had originally. (cash for clunkers is another example).
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Thirty years of “democRAT” / socialist / liberal / statist / marxist / communist / hate filled teaching will transform a country into a hellhole. This has been proved by Hitler, Stalin, Red China, Castro, and others. Unpunished DOMESTIC TERRORISTS BILL AYERS and his lovely wife BERNADINE know this well and want it for the new United Socialist States of America.
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These people are President Obama’s (PBUH) mentors. He also sat in Reverend (!) Wright’s Black Liberation Church and sucked up a lot more of this way of thinking.
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The governments in socialist / statist / communist countries always start out promising much better lives for their people. And all they deliver is more poverty, loss of freedom, and human dignity. The Ayers and the people in the photos above should be doing life in a SUPERMAX PRISON–not “teaching” (aka “community organizing”) our children.
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TAKE OUT THE TRASH IN 2010 AND IN 2012.
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John Bibb
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After looking at the picture on the lower right, that says it all for me. Edukation for all!
I’ve already told my son that if he gets any census forms from school, he is to bring them home to me, and not answer anything by himself. Also, if he rats me out to the authorities because Obama told hom to, he’s grounded for life!
s/b because Obama told him to,
When ever I see any policy linked to the likes of Ayers ET AL I get so ticked off at the people who didn’t vote in 08 because they didn’t like the republican candidate. Then I think, well we all needed to see what we were in for (by electing Obama) to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
And I totally agree with RedDog:
Should be a 2010+ campaign promise.
Bill Ayers wrote Dreams of My Father.
Yes, I remember well. I was bussed from the ‘burbs to inner city Charlotte, NC. You fail to mention throwing children into an environment of racial tension and downright hostility. White kids were held responsible by alot of the black kids for all the sins of slavery and Jim Crow.
My dad was a career soldier. We had just transfered to NC from Germany. I had never met more than a couple black people before and certainly did not harbor any ill towards them. Then to be thrown into that mix overnight was a bit of culture shock to say the least.
On a positive note, I do credit the experience for my taste in music. I did have black friends, too.
The school sucked though.
RTater, you a Chashill fan?
You are right…I forgot to mention the DANGERS of bussing our innocent children into the inner city. A ghastly idea!! And the kids who came to the burbs just grew more and more angry that their inner city schools weren’t just as good, without understanding that the reason for that was liberal-producing poverty…not the fault of those of us who were successful in life.
My daughter will NOT be watching the 9/8 address at her private school. Also, at her school, plagarism is considered a serious offense.
I too heard that the writing style of Bill Ayers is very similar to the book Dreams From My Father. Interesting that he is not given any credit.
Given the above, we will choose a private school over public every time.
Different story here. I was standing outside watching the first ever busload of black kids come to our high school. Even the white bullies were polite. We were kids and we all got along. This was Texas, and I know many had red-necked parents, but we kids showed we wanted to start fresh on our own. What the heck happened…. lots, I know.
I am. I especially like his take on TWA 800. So many unanswered questions.
RedDog and 7th, I guess it depends on the teacher. I remember my Trig teacher in High School in the 80′s saying that her favorite author who was against communism was Dr. Suess. I did not know until then that he was a big anti-communist. She told us that in the Cat in the Hat (don’t know how to underline or italicize) where the kids at the end are told to go clean up the pink stuff, was really a metaphore for getting rid of communism. She was one of my all time favorite teachers.
Gladz – bingo, and thanks for giving the credit to whom it belongs.
Fixed.
The Won is a fraud about most other things too.
That’s funny, coming from the son of ConEd.
Fifty years ago we had UN Day and UNICEF -The United Nations Children’s Fund – week, They wanted us to go door to door with a blue can and raise money “for the children”.
Luckily we were always too busy for extra activities at school so we never got sucked in. Give thanks for hard times-they turned me into a greedy capitalist.
Why doesn’t someone write an article about Michell-o’s lovely ‘do’ in that old photo?
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says:
Connect the dots…
if you want to be a loser, hang around with losers. if you want to be a communist revolutionary a-hole ….
Not my kids, they are agents for conservative change. They counter-argue every teacher and every friend and make them back up their statements with facts.
Rogue, funny you should mention that. For Christmas one year, I gave out the videos that included Cashill’s ‘take’ on that.
Rogue and Tater..glad to see some others who follow Jack.
Yes Christ was a Socialist, Christ was the ultimate salesman, Christ was (fill in blank). Some damn fools never learned not to play with fire have they? God is God and Bill Ayers, Uncle Hugo and BroBama ain’t.
—
Ha(bang bang)ppy Ramadan (bang bang) to you all(boom)
Celebrate the Religion of Peace with an AK-47 and some simitec.
I share that goal as a home educator. My wife and I don’t home school to isolate our kids from the world; we are innoculating them so that when it’s time for them to take their place in civil society, their conservative Christian values will keep them from being infected by the liberal culture.
Nail on head. The one character trait that the radical lefties share is insufferable arrogance.
So he “walked out of jail and into his first teaching job.” What kind of school would even consider hiring that?
Big fan here. I emailed him tonight as I am in KC and apologized for not being able to get together.
VERY good investigative journalist.