What
You're Missing in Our Subscriber-only CounterPunch Newsletter
Hezbollah's Rise,
Israel's Fall
Peggy
Thomson visits Hezbollah's southern commander. Guerilla warfare Comanche-style: The greatest
light cavalry since Ghenghis Khan; How the whites got the Texas
that the Bush family moved to. Alexander Cockburn
on why Israel lost. What you just missed, but can still get,
in our last newsletter: Paul Craig Roberts on the Collapse of
America. CounterPunch Online is read by millions
of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by
the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this
website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains
fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation
towards the cost of this online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now!
Upon returning from summer break I found
a surprising letter awaiting me written by three colleagues from
another university, two of whom I'd known and worked with for
decades. The letter simultaneously informed me about a conference
my friends were organizing and explained--- with some anguish
I think--- that I would not be welcome there.
They note that we're living
in troubled times, that calculated appeals to fear rule the day,
and that they hope to counter all of that. Ironically, fear is
stamped all over the letter.
I'm reminded of when Abbie
Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were hauled before the fearsome House
Committee on Un-American Activities, refused to bow, and helped
to laugh it out of existence. Or when the universities were cowed
by a bullying government into banning the DuBois Clubs--- a handful
of students in the youth-wing of the CP who were attacked by
Richard Nixon for intentionally creating a front group that would
dupe people because it rhymed with the Boys Clubs--- and we members
of Students for a Democratic Society signed up en masse and
swelled their membership a hundred-fold.
I find myself sitting here
humming Phil Ochs' brilliant "Love Me, I'm a Liberal".
Different times demand different
responses of course, but to claim the mantle of 'social justice'
while practicing this kind of exclusion is unacceptable.
Their letter to me and my response
to them are reproduced below. I've edited out identifiable references
to my colleagues in order to protect thewell, you decide, let's
just say their privacy. Onward!
William Ayers
Distinguished Professor
University of Illinois at Chicago
Dear Bill,
This is an unusual letter for
us to be writing and for you to receive. We count you among the
most noted progressive educators in the country with a deep commitment
to teaching for social justice. Yet, after extended deliberation
and discussion, we find ourselves in a real quandary. Because
of currenttimes, we cannot invite you to an event we are planning
for progressive educators. Because we know and deeply respect
you and your commitment to teaching for social justice, we felt
that an explanation was in order.
Next spring, we will host an
event to honor Bob Moses and progressive education. Bob is to
receive the John Dewey Prize for Progressive Education. This
prize is "to honor significant achievement in progressive
education for the purpose of making society more just."
In an era of increasing standardization and heightened inequities,
we want to shine a bright light on the ideals of progressive
education and remind the public that there is another model for
education that attends well to the needs of every child. It is
our intention to invite other progressive educators to this convening
and to create a significant news and media event honoring the
ideals of progressive education [and] the work of Bob Moses
It is because of our commitment
to educate the public and to undertake what is primarily a symbolic
project that we cannot risk a simplistic and dubious association
between progressive education and the violent aspects of your
past. We believe, of course, in your right to express your views,
then and now. This is not about curtailing your expression. Rather,
in this age when Google summarizes instantly, and often shallowly,
who we are, it is about trying to say as clearly as possible
what we are arguing for. If we, as educators, want to engage
the learner, in this case the public, where they are, then we
have to find ways for the public to see progressive education
not as radical or threatening but as nurturing and familiar,
connected to the very best aspects of their own learning experiences.
For the last five years local and regional news organizations
have taken the "liberal" faculty to task. It is an
environment that we have challenged when key principles were
involved, defending and maintaining ourcommitment to social justice
against the state bureaucracy. This event, however, is a celebration
honoring two educators' accomplishments and positively promoting
progressive education. We don't want a shallow press to prevail.
We want to engage the public with as little interference as possible.
One major reason for presenting
a prize at this time is that progressivism, and progressive education
in particular, have been greatly weakened by a broad and calculated
appeal to our fears in this changing world. We want to reinsert
into the civil dialogue that progressive education stands upon
its proven record and can be a viable alternative when our mood
turns away from fears and towards hopes. First, we need to get
ourselves back to the table, and then position ourselves as polite
in our discourse before celebrating the breadth of expression
within progressive education. Coming from behind may well demand
such strategic thinking, whether is satisfies all of our passion
or not.
We hope this letter finds you
well and that you understand and possibly appreciate this decision.
Sincerely,
"Lauren" and the organizers
August 29, 2006
Dear Lauren,
You have, of course, no obligation
to include me in the progressive education conference you're
organizing, certainly not in your deliberations about my suitability
to attend. I'm tempted to say, with apologies to Groucho Marx,
that I wouldn't want to attend any progressive education conference
that would have me.
Chances are I'd have never
heard of the conference had you not written, and in any case
wouldn't have given a second thought to my presence on or absence
from the guest list. But since you've opened this in the way
you have, since you've outlined your thinking on the matter and
invited me to understand and possibly appreciate your decision,
I feel I must respond.
Your hope to position progressive
education "not as radical or threatening but as nurturing
and familiar," is in some ways a fool's errand. Of course,
no one argues that the progressive movement should threaten students
or teachers or citizens-progressive education does indeed hold
the hope of realizing a humane and decent education for all within
a revitalized politics and a more authentically democratic society.
But progressive education, if it means anything at all, must
embody a profound threat to the status quo. It is a direct
challenge, for example, to all the policy initiatives that deskill
and hammer teachers into interchangeable cogs in a bureaucracy,
all the pressure to reduce teaching to a set of manageable and
easily monitored tasks, all the imposition of labels and all
the simple-minded metrics employed to describe student learning
and rank youngsters in a hierarchy of winners and losers. It's
a threat to all that, and more.
But here we face a contradiction
at the heart of our efforts: the humanistic ideal and the democratic
injunction tell us that every person is an entire universe, that
each can develop as a full and autonomous person engaged with
others in a common polity and an equality of power; the capitalist
imperative insists that profit is at the center of economic,
political, and social progress, and develops, then, a culture
of competition, elitism, and hierarchy. An education for democracy
fails as an adjunct to capitalism just as an education for capitalism
fails to build either a democratic ethos or a participatory practice.
We must engage, then, in the arena of school and education reform
as we struggle toward a world fit for all children--- a place
of peace and justice, joy and balance. The two are inseparable.
And so I believe that progressive
education must be part of a radical movement if it is
to be worthy of the hopes and dreams of those who fight to bring
humanistic alternatives to life. I mean radical in the sense
that Ella Baker, one of the unsung mothers of the Civil Rights
Movement, used the word. She called herself a radical, and she
explained that radical meant "going to the root." Little
reforms here and there never add up unless we get to the core
of the problems we face, she argued, analyze our situations,
connect the struggles as we work for more fundamental change.
Charlie Cobb, who co-wrote
Radical Equations, was also the author of the original
proposal for Freedom Schools in the South more than forty years
ago. The brief he wrote claimed that while Black children were
denied many things-decent school facilities, honest and forward-looking
curriculum, fully qualified teachers-the fundamental injury was
"a complete absence of academic freedom, and students are
forced to live in an environment that is geared to squashing
intellectual curiosity, and different thinking." Cobb called
the classrooms of Mississippi "intellectual wastelands,"
and he challenged himself and others "to fill an intellectual
and creative vacuum," and to encourage people "to articulate
their own desires, demands and questions." He was urging
students to confront the circumstances of their lives, to wonder
about how they got to where they were, and to think of how they
might change things. He was crossing hard lines of propriety
and tradition, convention and common sense, of course, poised
to break the law and overthrow a system. His proposal was designed
to plow a deep and promising furrow toward the new--- more than
radical, this was insurrection itself, progressive education
linked to radical politics.
Of course, we are required
now to make our own contributions in our own time and place;
the pathway, the content, and the curriculum must be of, by and
for this moment and this community. We might take inspiration
and attitude, sustenance and stance from the Mississippi experience,
but only as an orientation toward launch, toward imagining and
trying to bring to life something entirely new.
Finally, you refer to "the
violent aspects" of my past. As you know I've written extensively
about politics and protest as well as my own involvements, about
the dual responsibilities to act and to doubt, and about the
impossibility of claiming a high moral stance while sitting on
the sidelines. I've accounted for my actions during the US assaults
on Vietnam and against the Black Freedom Movement-which is what
I assume you're referring to-and paid the price asked of me by
the legal system. And I've said often that our society ought
to engage in a truth-and-reconciliation process concerning those
terrible and wondrous times; in other words, I'm happy to stand
up, tell my story, admit my mistakes, and take responsibility-shoulder-to-shoulder
with everyone else, including war criminals, politicians, soldiers,
officers, frat boys, students, scholars, citizens. Absent that,
you seem to say that I have some uniquely dreadful behavior to
account for, and I politely disagree.
I worry that you're imagining
a progressivism divorced from politics, the larger world, and
any real hope of transformation-a timid, tepid, soft and servile
thing. And I worry that your attempt to cleanse your conference
of the likes of me has no end: you'll have to cut out the Marxists
and the socialists, of course, anyone who writes critically about
capitalism and education, then the militants, the noisy anti-racists,
the pushy feminists, the gays and lesbians, anyone who refers
to "social justice"-a term under steady attack from
the powerful just now. I'm reminded of the last presidential
election when several presumably well-meaning liberals asked,
in effect, if women would please stop talking so loudly about
(or getting) abortions, if gays would please get back in the
closet, and if Black people and Mexicans might stay out of sight
for a few months so that "we" can win this thing, and
then everything will somehow be alright. It's not only unprincipled,
deeply cynical and cowardly, it's suicidal, a slippery slope
with lots of miserable historical precedent.
So, while I think I understand
what you've said, no, I don't appreciate it. I don't rationalize
it. I don't endorse it. And I refuse to participate in portraying
myself as a pariah. So invite me.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
