Unapologetic Former Terrorist Teaches Teachers

Although he no longer sets bombs, Ayers's political views are as radical now as they were in the 1970s. 'Viva Presidente Chavez!' he cried in a speech in Venezuela in 2006, in which he also declared, 'education is the motor-force of revolution.' Ayers speaks openly of his desire to use the classrooms of America's public schools to train up a generation of revolutionaries who will overturn the supposedly imperialist regime of capitalist America. In a 2006 interview with Revolution, the magazine of the devotedly 'Marxist-Leninist-Maoist' Revolutionary Communist Party, Ayers decried American conservatives as 'the most reactionary cabal of ideologues I've ever seen.' According to Ayers, these ideologues control 'all three branches of the federal government, control many state governments, control the media — the kind of bought priesthood of the media that does nothing but bow down to them and kowtow to them.' Ayers accuses these ideologues of waging 'a whole frontal attack on the very idea of public education . . . an attack on the idea that there should be free common public education for all.' He attributes to them the 'zero tolerance' policies that have cropped up in schools across the nation. According to Ayers, we owe these irrational policies to conservatives who are relentlessly subverting democracy and working to create an authoritarian society.