Education or violence: The two-pronged revolution of Bill Ayers

When the Students for a Democratic Society organization was wracked by a schism in the summer of 1969, Bill Ayers sided with the faction that favored widespread revolution across the face of America. It is instructive that the newly formed SDS council honored Ayers with the title of secretary of education.

Based on his later career as a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois, it is a title he took seriously — it’s just too bad that so many others have ignored it, and what it tells us about Ayers’ plans for our country.

In another time, in another revolution, he would have been called the commissar of propaganda. But the goal was the same — to shift popular opinion against the capitalist economy, traditional morality, and self-determination — and to bring about social change through indoctrination rather than violence.

That, of course, is a long-term goal. It cannot be accomplished overnight, and since Ayers was part of a revolutionary movement that was impatient for change, he had to take a back seat while his colleagues tried bombs, rather than books, as their weapon of choice to bring down the establishment.

But that does not mean he wasn’t using his time well. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that Ayers always thought that education was the key to social change, even when he became discouraged by society’s resistance to his ideas.

Way back in 1966, Ayers was working with his girlfriend Diane Oughton at the Children’s Community School in Ann Arbor, where they taught using the Summerhill method, a progressive system that allowed students to set their own curriculum. All lessons were optional, and students were free to do whatever they wanted.

For all the reasons you would expect, the Children’s Community School failed within a couple of years, which helped to spur Ayers to pursue other means of revolutionary change.

In a 1970 analysis of Ayers and Oughton, UPI authors Lucinda Frank and Thomas Powers wrote that by late 1968, Ayers was speaking out about “the failure of education to change people.” He is quoted as saying, “We are tired of tiptoeing up to society and asking for reform.”

That no doubt explains the transformation of Ayers from a gentle teacher who encouraged students to “do their own thing” to a harsh revolutionary who used bombs in an effort to force people to do whatever he wanted them to do — namely to reject capitalism.

But we should be clear that while Ayers adopted violence, he never abandoned education. Indeed, unless Ayers was truly schizophrenic in his outlook, he thought that education and violence could serve the same end — revolutionary change — and he proved himself on more than one occasion to be willing to switch tactics as necessity dictated. The only thing he has never done is renounce his dream of a socialist revolution.

In fact, Ayers wrote as recently as last year, “Every revolution is impossible until it occurs; after the fact, every revolution seems inevitable.”

It may seem a coy sentiment, but during the bold 1960s, Ayers and his fellow radicals were much more transparent about their loyalties and their priorities than they are today. In a January 1970 column by Robert Allen and John Goldsmith, a friend of Ayers by the name of Ted Gold gave his plan for what would follow their hoped-for destruction of the American government.

“An agency of the people of the world would be set up to run U.S. society and economy after the defeat of U.S. imperialism abroad,” he told a crowd at the national Weatherman revolutionary council held in Flint, Mich., in December 1969.

One listener asked with apparent nervousness, “Does that mean that if the people of the world succeed in liberating themselves before American radicals make the American revolution, then Chinese, Africans, and others will take over here and run things for white America?”

The dedicated revolutionary Gold didn’t miss a beat. “Well,” he said, “if it takes fascism to bring about the American revolution, I guess we’ll have to have fascism.”

Yes, those were refreshingly transparent times. There was never any need to wonder what kind of “fundamental transformation” these revolutionaries had in mind for our country. Indeed, in 1970 the group issued a “Declaration of a State of War” against the United States government — and Gold was not just talking the talk. He died, along with Terry Robbins and Ayers’ girlfriend Diana Oughton, in New York City in March 1970, as “glorious heroes of the revolution,” when a nail bomb they were building exploded prematurely instead of at the military dance it was intended to shatter.

Forty years later, Ayers and his revolutionary wife, Bernardine Dohrn, honored those “heroes” in a commemorative essay as “beautiful and committed young people who believed fiercely in peace and justice and freedom.” They forgot to mention fascism.

Ayers was perhaps the primary intellectual force behind the 1970s revolution, and he was a key author of “Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Imperialism,” which was distributed while he was a fugitive from federal charges in 1974. The book was dedicated to Gold, Oughton and Robbins, as well as dozens of other radicals including Sirhan Sirhan, the convicted assassin of Robert Kennedy.

It is doctrinaire communist propaganda, and since Ayers continues to stand behind his revolutionary writings, we can gain insight into what this longtime instructor of young educators actually believes. If you wondered why so many modern schools have become a cultural war zone where traditional families, traditional religion and traditional values are mocked and ridiculed, you need look no further than the agenda of Bill Ayers. Here is one small, but vital, example out of “Prairie Fire”:

“The modern male-run nuclear family, when we tear away the veil of sentimentality, is the basic unit of capitalist society. Capitalism and the modern family matured together historically, feeding each other’s development. In the family, women both reproduce the labor force and begin the socialization process of the new generation, which is essential to the productive system and the functioning of society.”

Did you catch that? Women’s role as mother and educator in traditional families is “ESSENTIAL ... to the functioning of society.” Given the desire of Ayers and his socialist allies to overthrow capitalism society, it is no wonder that for the past 50 years, there has been a deliberate, debilitating, deadly attack on the traditional nuclear family in schools, churches and legislation. This “nuclear” bomb has done much more damage to society than any mere explosive.

It’s not all one man’s fault, of course, — whether Ayers or Dewey — but it’s obvious that there’s been a sea change in American values over the past 50 to 100 years. Anyone who can’t see it — or who claims there was no damage done by rejecting the heritage that made America great — is himself but one more example of collateral damage, one more victim of the time bomb that Ayers, the “secretary of education,” happily planted many years ago.