Bill Ayers

“Ten Years of Assessing Students with Scientific Exactitude,” by Michael Winerip, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/education/new-york-city-student-testing-over-the-past-decade.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=Michael%20Winerip&st=cse .

Occupy your Imagination!

Occupy the Future!

Bill Ayers interview

With the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements there seems to be a distinct parallel between what is happening now and what was happening in the 60’s: the summer of ’68, world uprisings, the Civil Rights movement, the general malaise with the establishment. What is your take on Occupy?

 

1). It’s tempting to make comparisons, but I resist. Humanity plunges forward, circumstances shift, unpredictable upheaval and fickle fate allow us to redraw the maps of the known world. What’s consistent is this: people find ways to resist what they find unjust and unacceptable—not everyone all the time, not neatly nor universally, certainly not predictably. And our responsibility—personally, collectively, generationally—also remains the same: to make a concrete analysis of real conditions, to open our eyes to the world around us, to act on whatever the known demands. We are fortunate to live at a moment when hope and history rhyme, and when a participatory, popular movement for justice and peace is in-the-making.

Occupy is an expression of hope and an invitation to pay attention at this unique and expectant moment. It’s an opening, not a destination. People naming the obstacles to their full humanity, people in motion, people growing and changing and teaching and learning are people who can storm the heavens and accomplish the previously unthinkable.

And Occupy has already won, that is, the movement has changed the frame, redefined the discussion, and introduced a range of new ideas into the public square, for example: We are the 99%! Like every other movement in history, it was “impossible” the day before it burst onto the scene, and yet it seemed suddenly “inevitable” the day after.

The response of the powerful follows an age-old, exhausted and predictable script: ignore them, ridicule them, try to co-opt them, and beat the shit out of them—and all four responses are still in-play. The wonder of the movement is its ability to see these moves for what they are, and to hold tight to their independent vision, unique approach, and this precious thing. 99%!

As American culture has evolved over the past 100 years it has gone through
some abrupt shifts in ideology. Perspectives changed dramatically through
the mid-20th century and yet we are now seeing a kind of cultural stagnation
in which there is a growing resistance to change. The concept of America as
the “melting pot” has been thrown out the window and now immigration, class warfare and economic inequality are political campaign points. Why do you think there is such a growing market for the “us vs. them” fear mongering we are seeing in today’s political theater?

 

2). I fear you’re looking at history through rose-colored glasses. There has always been resistance to change, class warfare, nativist and jingoistic attitudes, and hatred of immigrants. And at any given moment, things can indeed feel slow and stagnating in spite of the fact that chaos, turmoil, commotion, pandemonium, dynamism, zip and zing are churning just out of sight. Look again.

Throughout the latter half of the 20th century there has been a constant
attack on the educational systems of the US, particularly from the far
Right. As states like Texas continue to rewrite the history books, attempt
to introduce fundamentalist ideologies into schools, and challenge
scientific research and facts with moral and ethical concepts based on
religious belief how do you see this affecting the future of America’s
youth?

 

3). It’s generous to call anything coming from the Right concerning the school battles “moral and ethical concepts.” These moves are ideology, unvarnished and unchained.

The noisy proponents of market competition in public education have managed to push their ideology onto the agenda by the force of their wealth, certainly not because of any moral persuasion, or even the results that their schemes have produced. But the project continues, because it is dogma: faith-based and fact-free. We need to challenge the freight train with evidence and argument, and most important, with a vision consistent with our deepest democratic dreams.

Education in a democracy must be distinct from education under a dictatorship or a monarchy, but how?  Surely school leaders in fascist Germany or Albania or medieval Saudi Arabia or apartheid South Africa all agreed, for example, that students should behave well, stay away from drugs and crime, do their homework, study hard, and master the subject matters, so those things don’t differentiate education in a democracy from any other. What makes education in a democracy distinct is a commitment to a particularly precious and fragile ideal, a foundational belief in the infinite and incalculable value of every human being. The implication of this for education is enormous: the fullest development of all, I believe, is the necessary condition for the full development of each, and conversely, the fullest development of each is necessary for the full development of all. Education is where we decide whether we love the world enough to invite young people in as full participants and constructors and creators; and whether we love our children enough to give them the tools not only to participate but also to change all that they find before them. Democracy, after all, is geared toward participation and engagement, and it’s based on that common faith: every human being is a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, and creative force, and each one is also a piece of the many.  Every human being is born free and equal in dignity and rights, each is endowed with reason and conscience, and deserves, then, a sense of solidarity, brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect. We focus our efforts, not on the production of things so much as on the production of fully developed human beings who are capable of controlling and transforming their own lives, citizens and residents who can participate fully in public life.  Democratic teaching encourages students to develop initiative and imagination, the capacity to name the world, to identify the obstacles to their full humanity, and the courage to act upon whatever the known demands.  Education in a democracy is characteristically eye-popping and mind-blowing—always about opening doors and opening minds as students forge their own pathways into a wider, shared world. Much of what we call schooling forecloses or shuts down or walls off meaningful choice-making; much of it is based on obedience and conformity, the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime throughout history. Much of it banishes the unpopular, squirms in the presence of the unorthodox, hides the unpleasant.  There’s no space for skepticism, irreverence, or even doubt.  While many of us long for teaching as something transcendent and powerful, we find ourselves too-often locked in situations that reduce teaching to a kind of glorified clerking, passing along a curriculum of received wisdom and predigested and often false bits of information.  This is a recipe for disaster in the long run. Educators, students, and parents press for an education worthy of a democracy, including an end to sorting people into winners and losers through expensive standardized tests which act as pseudo-scientific forms of surveillance; an end to starving schools of needed resources and then blaming teachers for dismal outcomes; and an end to the rapidly accumulating “educational debt,” the resources due to communities historically segregated, under-funded and under-served.  All children and youth in a democracy, regardless of economic circumstance, deserve full access to richly-resourced classrooms led by caring, qualified and generously compensated teachers.

It seems that as education plays less and less of a role in the life of
people in America, particularly in the south, people are turning toward the
media to inform themselves. With much of the current media controlled by
corporations whose bottom line is profit, disinformation has become a
selling point. How does this affect political change? What ways can people
educate themselves in order to be informed without falling victim to the
“filter bubble” of being told what you want to hear?

 

4). No whining, no nostalgia…when was the Golden Age in education? When 10% graduated high school, or when racial segregation was legal? When was the media free and smart?

The reality is that everyone at all times must search for the truth from multiple sources, including first-hand participation, in an environment of mystification and lies and stupidity. Every movement has had its underground press. We must open our eyes and reinvent a media for our own uses and for our own time. Today our access to the world is unprecedented, and the capacity to speak up and speak out exceptional. Look at your own efforts right here, right now, just this.

SDS was a movement that grew out of dissatisfaction with the state of
affairs on the mid 1960s, as it evolved it became focused on the Vietnam War
and the US’s continued presence there, as well as on the Civil Rights
movement. Do you see parallels between SDS and the Occupy movement? Do you see distinct differences?

 

5). SDS was part of the “New Left.” We were defining ourselves as participatory and peace and justice-oriented, as well as an opening of a public space for the expression of a million grievances and our wildest dreams. We were in opposition to capitalism and the political establishment, but also to the “Old Left” of Stalinism and centralized and organizational dogma. This was a great strength, but also a weakness: we were no longer shackled with the dead hand of the Communist Party, but we cut ourselves off from the best experiences of a generation of activists. Occupy is powered by an anarchist impulse—it rejects Stalinism, but also the idea of charismatic leaders defining the direction of the struggle. Again, this is a great strength with its own challenges.

In the way that youth culture got behind the Civil Rights movement in the
60’s the current Occupy movement is focused on Economic Rights. Do you think there is a valid comparison to be made between the US involvement in Vietnam and the way in which corporations are waging economic war on free speech and constitutional rights now? Are Economic Rights as pertinent as Civil Rights?

 

6). No. Yes.

Much of the current Occupy movement has been a passive protest movement that attempts to avoid violence, yet these protestors have been met with an
increasingly militarize police force that seems bent on violent
interactions. What do you think the role of authority is in shaping the
relationship between the protestor’s actions and the police actions?

 

7). I wouldn’t call the movement “passive.” Sitting in your chair, hip and cynical, sucking on a pipe and doing nothing is passive. Power is based on violence no matter how calm things appear; when effectively challenged it always bears its teeth.

Outside of the US there has been a wide ranging series of uprisings,
particularly the in Middle East. Governments like Tunisia and Egypt have
been fully overthrown/removed and the politicians/dictators are currently
being brought to justice. While this is happening at the same time as
Occupy, the approach and the scope of those involved in the Arab Spring
uprising are radically different and much more popular, with tens of
thousands of people taking over Tahir Square, as opposed to low thousands at
most in the US. Do you feel the situations outside the US are so different
that they provoke a larger response or is it that American’s themselves are
less likely to go to the streets in order to affect change?

 

8). The Arab Spring is still in play, and it has not fully accomplished anything. Stay posted. Occupy is also in-the-making, a work-in-progress, and surely an off-spring of the events abroad. Remember too that Tunisia was more than that famous self-immolation. Wikileaks released documents that enraged the Tunisians. The US continues to imprison and torture Bradley Manning who initially leaked the papers.

Before Tahrir Square, those kids were seen as crummy, passive, stupid, uninvolved, apolitical, and irrelevant. No more. They changed themselves/they began to change the world. It can happen anywhere, anytime, and it’s always thus: look at Mississippi in 1963, South Africa in 1985, Tianenman Square in 1989, and on and on.

 

1. What words of advice would you give a teacher who is struggling to incorporate reflective writing practices into his or her pedagogy?

 

Recognize that aesthetics is at the heart of teaching—strive for beauty and something pleasing and lovely in your work—and remember that the opposite of aesthetic is anesthetic. Anesthetics put us to sleep, but an educated person is always striving to open her eyes, to pay attention, to see more clearly from wider and different angles of regard. Wake up! Get moving! Nourish the imaginative and the weird and the queer! This is a call to ourselves no less than to our students. Art often hurts, is unruly and refuses to be domesticated, but art also urges voyages.

 

2.  How would you direct your class to learn the fundamentals of writing while helping them better connect to the culture they live in?

 

Everyone has to “learn the fundamentals” in light of something, or while engaged in something, so why not in larger concentric circles of culture, society, experience, personal observation, politics? Classrooms should always ask in one way or another: What’s your story? How is it like or unlike the stories of other people here and elsewhere? How did you get here? Where are you headed? What are your choices?

 

Here are a couple I use a lot to get the juices flowing: What’s the story of your birth? How do you know? How’d you get your first name? What are three nicknames you might consider for yourself? Have you ever been wrongly accused? What are three things you MUST do before you die?

 

So begin class: Write for 10 minutes and finish this thought: “People always ask me…” After 10 minutes, ask them to read aloud. Your mind will be blown. Then collect the papers and give a second prompt: I can’t believe I did it, but I guess I did…While they work on the second, go from person to person, teaching the fundamentals: spelling, grammar, usage. I also like homework assignments that are simple lists: everything you saw in the last 24 hours that was red; a collection of things observed on the sidewalk outside school; all the ingredients in dinner last night.

 

3.  What are good writing challenges/assignments that will help the student enjoy Discovery and Surprise?

 

Discovering things is inherently enjoyable—watch a baby or a toddler, anyone under six who has not yet been schooled, and witness both their internal desire to discover, to explore, to ask queer questions of the cosmos, and the deep satisfaction that accompanies making connections, proving hypotheses, reaching contingent conclusions. So you don’t have to labor hard; simply create a classroom environment and challenges/assignments that reflect what was learned by watching babies and toddlers.

 

We want our students to be able to think for themselves, to make judgments based on evidence and argument, to develop minds of their own. We want them to ask fundamental questions—Who in the world am I?  How did I get here and where am I going?  What in the world are my choices?  How in the world shall I proceed?—and to pursue answers wherever they might take them.

 

Good classrooms are rich with materials to explore, opportunities to leap into learning, and provocations to think more deeply. Because I’m a freak for comics (and just wrote my first graphic novel), I want you to embrace graphics in writing, and across the curriculum. (By the way, looking at the finished product, a comic book about teaching seems somehow just right to me now—the intimacy of classrooms, the aesthetic and the feel of being an educator, the challenge and the joy, the pain and the promise—all of it tough to describe, and represented here with a distinct immediacy. It’s a pathway into the ineffable, relying neither on words nor images, and not mashing pictures onto words, but a third thing altogether with its own opportunities and demands—words and images working together in a dance of representation and meaning).

 

Graphic novels are now a normal part of the wildly diverse, wacky, and rich gumbo of our culture. If you were teaching a history class today on the Holocaust in Europe, you would mobilize memoir (Ann Frank, Elie Weisel) essay (Hannah Arendt, Thodore Adorno), and film (Shoah, The Sorrow and the Pity) to help students get a deep and meaningful, nuanced and complex picture of the entire sweep of the times and events. To leave out Maus would be to banish a fresh and intimate work that adds immeasurably to our overall understanding of the Holocaust.

Dykes to Watch out For is an essential text if you hope to understand the Clinton/Bush years. On and on and on: teachers integrate poetry and literature, art and science, film and painting into everything they teach, as they should. So why not comics?

I teach a writing class on memoir, and I use the graphics Maus, Persepolis, Fun Home, and Epileptic along with more traditional offerings like Homage to Catalonia and Black Boy. Students respond variously, but I would be irresponsibly narrowing their horizons if I left out the comic books.

 

Plus, the comics world might give teaching a new breath of life—wouldn’t it be cool if a zillion artists and marginalized bodies flocked to our classrooms to lend a hand?  

 

4.  Do you think a teacher’s reflections, or, perhaps, his or her ability to successfully teach all students, is enhanced and strengthened when students are invited to participate in the process? If so, have you tried to incorporate this sort of collaboration in your classrooms?

 

Everything is better/fuller/deeper/more authentic if students are in it from the start. The work of teaching—planning, organizing, setting up, cleaning up—should not be invisible to the kids. Quick example: A teacher sees the possibility of getting $500 from a local foundation if she submits a two-page proposal for a curricular project; she proposes to paint a huge map of the county on the playground blacktop, gets the grant, and one weekend she and her partner and friends get the supplies, paint the map, and dazzle the students until the novelty wears off. Another teacher starts from a different place: she says to the kids one Monday, “I saw this announcement in a teacher paper for a $500 grant…” The kids spend days brain-storming, calculating, writing a proposal, and executing the work. They are active, not passive, co-creators and colleagues not quiet recipients. Whenever my teaching feels to me like it’s not what it should be, or the class is heading south, I pause and say, “Something isn’t working for me here…Let’s spend some time talking about where the class is headed and where you want it to go…” Or I have an evaluation form that flips the script: What have I (student) done to make this class work well? What is one thing I’ve learned that I will carry with me, and what have I taught others? What do I want Bill to do next to contribute to our learning? It sounds scary, but it is essential.

 

5.  Do students do enough creative writing exercises in school from your point of view, or are their assignment formulated, dull, boring, and geared towards standardized tests?

 

Not enough, not nearly enough; and, yes, boring, dull, clichéd, etcetera…

 

6.  Could you elaborate more on how teachers can teach in an alternative way as an ‘Act of Resistance?’

 

I’d never really considered teaching until it snuck up on me, and captured me when I wasn’t paying attention. I was 20 years old in 1965, living in Ann Arbor, and returning to the University of Michigan from a stint in the Merchant Marines. The US invasion of Viet Nam was escalating, and in October, in the midst of growing conflict and protest, I was one of 39 students who sat-in and disrupted the local Selective Service office. I was jailed for 10 days, and there I met a fellow anti-war activist who was involved in a small freedom school affiliated with the Civil Rights Movement. I walked out of jail and into my first teaching position and everything—the kids, the sounds and smells, the energy and the rhythm—felt somehow just right to me. From that day until this I’ve been a teacher, a peace activist, a trouble-maker, an artist-in-residence, and a work-in-progress, and teaching has been linked in my mind to the long and never-ending struggle to create a more peaceful, just, and balanced world.

There is no recipe for resistance, but there are some simple (simple to say if not to do) steps one can take to stay alive: 1) Make a list of your commitments to your students today (I will never treat them like objects; I will never undermine their integrity), and put it on your mirror and try to live up to it every day, especially after failing to fully live up to it yesterday; 2) Creative insubordination (cut the wires to the PA); 3) Ask forgiveness not permission (Oh, I didn’t realize I needed that form); 4) Befriend the custodian; 5) Take the side of the child; 6) Get to know the parents outside of school (bar-b-q, book club); 7)Make friends in the community; 8) Find allies among the teachers, and create a teacher-talk group; 9) Tell the truth as you see it, but always with the goal of communicating and convincing (as opposed to having a goal of feeling self-righteously superior); 10) Have a sense of humor, doubt, skepticism, and agnosticism, especially about yourself.

 

I try to resist bureaucracy and mindlessness, powerlessness and despair, and sometimes I am slapped down and sometimes praised. I’m never sure in advance which will come or when or why. I was on the organizing committee for a faculty union recently, and took a lot of abuse from the administration; I was advised against being involved in school reform in the early 90’s and then got praise and promotion because of my involvement. Since I can’t predict with certainty what will happen, I think the best course of action is to do the very best job you can of being fully you, doing what you do.

 

7.  In ‘Seeing the Student’ you mentioned that ‘developmental theory’ was used to speed kids up through the stages of development. What happens to kids when the institution tries to speed them up? How does this affect their morale or performance?

 

I think I said that it could be employed as speed-up, just as high-stakes testing spawns test-prep tutors. But the important point is that human beings take time to grow, time to reflect, wonder, imagine, pretend, rest, be bored, and a lot else. In our fast-moving, OCD, ADHD world, too many adults and institutions consider childhood a messy and unfortunate problem to be overcome. Out come the drugs and more.

 

8. You wrote in the Introduction of ‘To Teach’ that teachers should not be mechanical cogs in an impersonal system but ethical actors with a large degree of flexibility in order to support the growth of the children. Since you first started teaching until now, have teachers become more like cogs in a machine or ethical actors there to support the development of children?

 

My brother Rick with whom I wrote Teaching the Taboo describes coming to terms with a fact of life: I’m an agent of the state, he says, and an agitator and inciter—both. I have to live within, not run away from, that contradiction.

 

And it’s always been so. I have no nostalgia for a golden age when teachers were moral actors, or the path to excellent and engaged teaching was paved with rose petals. When I say we should not be mechanical cogs, I’m urging us to recognize and embrace that contradiction, live within it, and find ways to organize, link up with our natural allies (parents and students and colleagues and community folks) and fight back! This involves in the first place changing the frame of the discussion. I hope that people might see that teaching at its best is profoundly intellectual and ethical work, filled with joy and challenge, agony punctuated with moments of ecstasy, and certainly that all the ideas of teaching as clerking are not only reductive and morally repulsive, but they are also aesthetically unappealing and unlovely, entirely unworthy of our deepest humanistic dreams.

 

Education in a democracy must be distinct from education under a dictatorship or a monarchy, but how?  Surely school leaders in fascist Germany or communist Albania or medieval Saudi Arabia all agreed, for example, that students should behave well, stay away from drugs and crime, do their homework, study hard, and master the subject matters, so those things don’t differentiate a democratic education from any other.  What makes education in a democracy distinct is a commitment to a particularly precious and fragile ideal, the belief that the fullest development of all is the necessary condition for the full development of each; conversely, the fullest development of each is necessary for the full development of all. Education is where we decide whether we love the world enough to invite young people in as full participants and constructors and creators; and whether we love our children enough to give them the tools not only to participate but to change all that they find before them. Democracy, after all, is geared toward participation and engagement, and it’s based on a common faith: every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, and creative force.  Every human being is born free and equal in dignity and rights, each is endowed with reason and conscience, and deserves, then, a sense of solidarity, brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect. We focus our efforts, not on the production of things so much as on the production of fully developed human beings who are capable of controlling and transforming their own lives, citizens who can participate fully in public life.  Democratic teaching encourages students to develop initiative and imagination, the capacity to name the world, to identify the obstacles to their full humanity, and the courage to act upon whatever the known demands.  Education in a democracy is characteristically eye-popping and mind-blowing—always about opening doors and opening minds as students forge their own pathways into a wider, shared world. How do our schools here and now measure up to the democratic ideal? Much of what we call schooling forecloses or shuts down or walls off meaningful choice-making.  Much of it is based on obedience and conformity, the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime throughout history.  Much of it banishes the unpopular, squirms in the presence of the unorthodox, hides the unpleasant.  There’s no space for skepticism, irreverence, or even doubt.  While many of us long for teaching as something transcendent and powerful, we find ourselves too-often locked in situations that reduce teaching to a kind of glorified clerking, passing along a curriculum of received wisdom and predigested and often false bits of information.  This is a recipe for disaster in the long run. Educators, students, and citizens might press now for an education worthy of a democracy, including an end to sorting people into winners and losers through expensive standardized tests which act as pseudo-scientific forms of surveillance; an end to starving schools of needed resources and then blaming teachers for dismal outcomes; and an end to the rapidly accumulating “educational debt,” the resources due to communities historically segregated, under-funded and under-served.  All children and youth in a democracy, regardless of economic circumstance, deserve full access to richly-resourced classrooms led by caring, qualified and generously compensated teachers.

 

The noisy proponents of market competition in public education have managed to push their ideas onto the agenda by the force of their wealth, certainly not because of any moral persuasion, or even the results that their schemes have produced. But the project continues, because it is faith-based and fact-free. We need to challenge the freight train with evidence and argument and a vision consistent with our deepest democratic dreams.

 

In a school focused on the needs and dreams of the broad community, we would be inspired by fundamental principles of democracy, including a common faith in the incalculable value of every human being. We would rally around the idea that the full development of each is the condition for the fullest development of all, and conversely that the fullest development of all is the condition for the full development of each. One implication of this principle is that in a truly democratic spirit, whatever the wisest and most privileged parents want for their kids—that is exactly what we as a community want for all of our children.

Imagine a school or a classroom where asking, framing, and pursuing their own questions becomes the central work of both teachers and students; where the question of what is worthwhile to know and experience is taken up as a living challenge to focus all student activity; where we would practice participatory democracy; where all the themes, implicit and explicit, are built on a foundational idea that we are swirling through a living history, that nothing is guaranteed or foreordained, that we are, each and all of us, works-in-progress swimming shakily toward an uncertain and distant shore; and where every day we act out the belief that the classroom, far from being a preparation for life, is indeed life itself. Building community and trust and traditions and engagement would then become central lessons of a successful school.