Bill Ayers

It happened again Saturday night.

Anne and I were at a social event with people I didn’t know. We were seated at a table along with two other couples, both much younger than we are.

“What do you do?”

“I’m a K-5 art teacher.”

As I often point out, in the old days this answer would have produced a smile and a response like, “Oh, that must be fun.” There would be nowhere to go after that and we would move on to other topics of small talk.

Not now.

They always want to talk about tenure, seniority, firing teachers, contracts and test scores.

“You really want to talk to me about tenure,” I will ask?

And they really do.

In this case she worked at a non-teaching job at a charter school in a city I won’t name. She was young and obviously liked what she was doing. Her date smiled and sat back.

She challenged me on tenure.

I explained that tenure was not a lifetime guarantee of a job, but simply meant that a tenured teacher could be fired for cause. She didn’t know that.

She challenged me on linking teacher performance evaluation to test scores. Her school does it. Even she is evaluated on students’ test scores.

“That’s crazy,” I said. “You don’t even work with the kids. They might as well evaluate you based on the price of ham.”

She didn’t think that was funny.

She challenged me on tenure.

“We have teachers who have taught for only two years, and they’re great teachers.”

“No you don’t,” I said.

“What?”

“No you don’t. Nobody is great at anything they have only done for two years. You can’t be a great painter in two years. You can’t be a great basketball player, a plumber, or a writer. You certainly can’t be a great teacher in two years.”

I finally gave up and Anne and I went to the dance floor even though the DJ was playing Why Don’t You Build me Up, Buttercup.

As we were leaving, her boyfriend came up, shook my hand and said, “Thanks. She gets mad when I tell her all that.”

“You set me up?”

He smiled.

Next time I’m at a party and someone asks me what I do, I’m telling them I’m an accountant. They will leave me alone for sure.

—

I was in Europe when the state of Georgia murdered Troy Davis. From there the barbarity of this act is evident and universally condemned. My friend Alice Kim captured my reaction to this horrific legal lynching.

From Alice Kim, Dancing the Dialectic, September 22, 2011. For Troy

I feel numb. I feel defeated. I don’t want to read any more stories or news reports or even any more calls to action. Then I feel ashamed. I want to be strong. I want to know what the right thing to say is at this moment for this moment.

“There is nothing to say,” Ronnie Kitchen said when we talked on the phone this morning. Ronnie was the twentieth death row prisoner to be exonerated from Illinois’ death row. We’ve known each other for fourteen years. We hung on the phone for a few moments in silence. Then we remembered our visit to Savannah. In the summer of 2009, when Ronnie walked out of Cook County Courthouse a free man, we went down to Georgia to see his mom. Since we were near Savannah, we decided to visit Martina Correia, Troy Davis’ sister.

I remember sitting in Martina’s living room with her mom and sister. They were so pleased to meet Ronnie. I think they saw Troy in him. Ronnie was living proof that Troy could be free one day. This past spring, Virginia Davis passed away just days after the Supreme Court denied Troy’s appeal. With this decision, we knew that an execution date would soon be set. Martina said she thought her mom died of a broken heart.

That day, Martina took us to the scene of the crime, the Burger King parking lot where Officer Mark MacPhail was killed. She took us to the balcony of the motel where one of the eyewitnesses had supposedly seen Troy shoot the officer. We stayed on the balcony while Martina went across the street to the parking lot. In broad daylight, we couldn’t identify Martina from where we were standing, let alone a stranger in the middle of the night.

Then Martina, a gracious host, took us to downtown Savannah where Ronnie got to taste his first pralines. They were smooth and sweet and melted in your mouth. We sampled pralines from every candy store that we walked by. Amidst the beauty of Savannah, the harbor and the cobble-stone lined streets, Martina pointed out the spot where slaves were once auctioned off.

I think fondly of that day we spent with Martina. It was a hopeful time.

Now, I hear how weak Martina’s voice sounds in an interview she gave on the day of Troy’s execution. Photographs taken of her in the protest area outside the prison show tears in her eyes. She insists that her brother’s death will not be in vein. I want to honor Troy, Martina, and their family.

I wish I had deep, profound words of wisdom to offer. What I can offer is my love. In the face of this overwhelming injustice, I ask us all to love fiercely, to refuse to look away even when it’s hard, and to never forget. In Troy’s memory, in solidarity, in struggle, and in sorrow.

Bernardine Dohrn

Up from the musty subways, two blocks down Broadway, the controlled chaos of Occupy Wall Street leaps into view, part happening (musicians drumming, piles of clothing, an efficient and tasty food service, a library, the medical unit) part street fair (homemade postering, people browsing, the brilliant Beehive Collective art posters, bustling tables of conversation) and part BugHouse Square/Union Square (debates, engaging passers-by, speakers, daily democratic meetings). Liberty Plaza, formerly Zuccotti Park, is long (going East/West) and narrow (up and downtown).

Occupy Wall Street is entering its 4th week. It’s fresh, a break, visceral bolts of lightning. Pointing fingers at the fat cats, it challenges the gouging 1%. It unites the 99. It (so far) has no program, no demands. It occupies the park at the foot of the stone and glass citadels. Located just two blocks East of the World Trade Center abyss, and blocks West from the Tombs (the massive gulag that cages the poor and people of color, Occupy Wall Street is multiplying, replicable. The titans roost high above all of our cities. This occupation is decentralizing itself. Sparked by the young who have no jobs, but have crushing student loans that will keep them indebted to the banks and banking universities for decades (Cancel the Debt!), witnessing their parents’ homes foreclosed, they see the gross financial/corporate money grab for what it is and in contrast, they illuminate another way of being.

Two inventions are stunning to experience: the General Assembly, the daily horizontal, consensus-seeking, rebellious, anarchist meeting; and the peoples’ microphone. Since the police prohibit amplification, the occupying forces invented a living mike, repeating every 6-8 words from the speaker. When Naomi Klein spoke, she kept turning on the stage as in a theatre in the round, and as the crowd swelled, she had to wait until 3 echoes of her thought were repeated out from the center before continuing. It was funny and hard to catch the rhythm but it also involved all of us in restating her words, making them our own, amplifying out. We were all both speaking and listening, and the exuberance is contagious.

I approach two women holding Grannies for Peace signs, but all is not juicy here. I’m a granny for peace, I begin, looking for somewhere to join in. A torrent of complains flow forth: “This is just a Be-In!” (I remember my first Be-In at the lakefront in Chicago, 1966, I liked it.) “No politics! No demands.” They aren’t wrong, but not right, missing the flame. I move on.

OWS is the inheritor of the 1999 Seattle challenges to the World Trade Organization. It openly acknowledges the inspiration of Tunisia, Egypt, Wisconsin and Greece. Flanked by (some) important union support, multiracial (to some extent), revolted by endless US invasions abroad and national security wars against immigrants and the poor at home, and zealously passionate about climate change and protecting the earth, OWS is nurturing a beginning, a seed, a spark.

The police presence is massive, ominous and ugly, despite the extended and firm non-violent civil disobedience stance of the occupiers. Wall Street itself is blocked off by police barricades, making visible what is implicit. OWS says in response, “Occupy Public Space” and “Generate Solutions Accessible to Everyone,” living differently so everyone can live. Join us. Quickly.

Meet at the Board of Trade (LaSalle and Jackson) at 4 P.M. The Occupy Wall Street protests are coming full-blast to Chicago where Mayor Emanuel and the Civic Committee continue where Mayor Daley left off, with the city as their personal cash cow. On Monday education activists will play a key role in the flowering Occupy Chicago Movement.
I saw a great shirt in the New York demo: Property is Theft! Go to dialectical materials online to see more.

What follows is the first official, collective statement of the protesters in Zuccotti Park:

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.
They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.
They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government ontracts.*

To the people of the world, We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

The Best Among Us
Friday 30 September 2011
by: Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed

There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.

To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal. Ask Tim DeChristopher.

Choose. But choose fast. The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves. They know, even better than you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system is against you, how corporations have cemented into place a thin oligarchic class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists who live in their little gated Versailles while 6 million Americans are thrown out of their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million people a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills and 45,000 die from lack of proper care, where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20 percent, where the citizens, including students, spend lives toiling in debt peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a world of masters and serfs.

The only word these corporations know is more. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies.

Who the hell cares? If the stocks of ExxonMobil or the coal industry or Goldman Sachs are high, life is good. Profit. Profit. Profit. That is what they chant behind those metal barricades. They have their fangs deep into your necks. If you do not shake them off very, very soon they will kill you. And they will kill the ecosystem, dooming your children and your children’s children. They are too stupid and too blind to see that they will perish with the rest of us. So either you rise up and supplant them, either you dismantle the corporate state, for a world of sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea that the demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we are frog-marched toward self-annihilation.

Those on the streets around Wall Street are the physical embodiment of hope. They know that hope has a cost, that it is not easy or comfortable, that it requires self-sacrifice and discomfort and finally faith. They sleep on concrete every night. Their clothes are soiled. They have eaten more bagels and peanut butter than they ever thought possible. They have tasted fear, been beaten, gone to jail, been blinded by pepper spray, cried, hugged each other, laughed, sung, talked too long in general assemblies, seen their chants drift upward to the office towers above them, wondered if it is worth it, if anyone cares, if they will win. But as long as they remain steadfast they point the way out of the corporate labyrinth. This is what it means to be alive. They are the best among us.

http://nationalinterest.org/

Can Canada Really Be Scared of Free-Thinking?

It’s a question I have to ask after being denied entry again – this time, ironically, to give a paper on academics and public debate

William (‘Bill’) Ayers in Chicago’s Grant Park, in 2001. Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground, spent 10 years as a fugitive, a story he told in his book Fugitive Days. The former university professor has again been barred entry from Canada, where he had been invited to give a conference paper. (AP Photo/Ted S Warren)

In January this year, I was invited by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) to address the Worldviews Conference on Media and Higher Education to be held on 16 June 2011 in Toronto. The topic would be “The responsibility of academics to contribute to public debates in the media.”

I told the organizers then that while I would love to attend, I had been denied entry into Canada twice in the past few years – once in Calgary, and later at Island Airport – and that while lawyers on both sides of the border were engaging the issue, we were being met again and again by bureaucratic gibberish and classic rule-by-no-one. The president of OCUFA sent a letter to the Canada Border Services Agency hoping to resolve the matter, and received a boiler-plate response: “The CBSA is charged to ensure the security and prosperity of Canada by managing access of people and goods.” I explained that my participation in the conference would jeopardize neither, and promised to spend a lot of money while in town, but I got the same response.

I’m in Chicago today, and a video of my talk has been sent to the conference. One irony in this situation is that the injured party in all of this is not me primarily, but the people who, for whatever reason, wanted to engage me in conversation. After all, I will talk to myself all day, and probably disagree and argue with myself as usual. But what of the Canadians who thought it might be useful to have a dialogue? Tough luck: your government is vigilantly watching over your security and prosperity.

There’s another irony, of course, in the government preventing me from exercising the very responsibility I was invited to address. This is a basic issue of free and open debate and the democratic exchange of ideas – not one of a potential threat to the nation’s security.

The technical issue here is that the border guard who turned me back in Calgary said that, according his computer, I had quite a lengthy arrest record. True, I said, arrests from sit-ins, occupations, and antiwar activities 40 years ago, and all misdemeanors. Well, he responded, you have one felony conviction, and that’s why you will not get into Canada today.

But I don’t have any felony convictions. Prove that you don’t have any, he said.

Years and a lot of lawyer’s fees later, I’m still having trouble disproving a negative, if you get the Catch-22 here … but wait! I just realized that some of those fees are, indeed, contributing to the prosperity of Canada! OK, I’ll stay out.

I entered Canada a dozen times in the preceding decade – taking my kids to the Shakespeare or skiing in Banff, attending research conferences, speaking at universities – and have been to scores of other countries from Cyprus to China, Hong Kong to Beirut, the Netherlands to Chile. But perhaps those countries lack the thorough security sense of Canada.

As the public space contracts, the real victim becomes truth, honesty, integrity, curiosity, imagination, freedom itself. When academics fall silent, other victims include the high school history teacher on the west side of Chicago or in central Toronto, the English literature teacher in Detroit, or the maths teacher in a Vancouver middle school. They and countless others immediately get the message: keep quiet with your head down.

In Brecht’s play Galileo, the great astronomer set forth into a world dominated by a mighty church and an authoritarian power: “The cities are narrow and so are the brains,” he declared recklessly. Intoxicated with his own insights, Galileo found himself propelled towards revolution. Not only did his radical discoveries about the movement of the stars free them from the “crystal vault” that received truth insistently claimed fastened them to the sky, but his insights suggested something even more dangerous: that we, too, are embarked on a great voyage, that we are free and without the easy support that dogma provides. Here, Galileo raised the stakes and risked taking on the establishment in the realm of its own authority – and it struck back fiercely.

Forced to renounce his life’s work under the exquisite pressure of the Inquisition, he denounced what he knew to be true, and was welcomed back into the church and the ranks of the faithful, but exiled from humanity – by his own word. A former student confronted him in the street then:

“Many on all sides followed you … believing that you stood, not only for a particular view of the movement of the stars, but even more for the liberty of teaching – in all fields. Not then for any particular thoughts, but for the right to think at all. Which is in dispute.”

This is surely in play today: the right to talk to whoever you please, the right to read and wonder, the right to pursue an argument into uncharted spaces, the right to challenge the state or the church and its orthodoxy in the public square. The right to think at all.

I hold no grudge toward Canada or the Canadian people, and I still hope to return some day to what I always considered the beautiful beacon of freedom and sanity to the north. Well, not as free and sane as I’d imagined, but still …

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.

Hal was concerned about the transformation of that signature phrase from a revolutionary challenge to a marketing tool announcing that everybody has the capacity to become more worthy. It worried him that Gramsci was being made to sound like the irritating “mission statement” of the Gates Foundation, read every morning on NPR, announcing their belief that every person should have a chance to lead a full and productive life—not the right to actually lead that life, but merely a chance at it, and a diminishing one at that. There’s a big difference between those who envision a philanthropic society where the people of property and privilege share some of their largess with the less fortunate through a small group that rules as a kind of Lady Bountiful with beneficent kindness and fairness, and those, like Hal Adams who worked toward the creation of a robust public square, a commons characterized by shared ownership of community property, as well as a society built on an the unshakable faith in a quite radical proposition: every human being is of incalculable value, each endowed with artistic and intellectual capacity. We envision, then, a society that is actually self-governing, with a revolving leadership of organic philosophers: a fair society and a beloved community.

I want to build an educated city, a school without walls where we can live in search of, rather than in accommodation to. I want us to accept ourselves as works-in-progress, searching and unfinished, on the move in a dynamic, going world, with Chicago as our commons, our performance space, and our workshop.
I want to de-couple education from schooling: all human beings are learning from birth until death—learning, like eating and breathing, is entirely natural. It’s wasteful to think of education as a K-12 affair, or to think of education as preparation for life rather than life itself.
I want a city poised to learn more in order to achieve more in terms of human enlightenment and freedom.
An educated city would take seriously the notion that residents are the sovereign, neither objects to manipulate nor subjects to be ruled. Education, formal and informal, would become focused on the creation of engaged citizens capable of developing the public square and the common space.
Schools would become, then, places where the dreams, aspirations, knowledge, and skills of youth are sensible starting points for learning, where democracy is practiced rather than ritualized.
I want to imagine with my friend and mentor Grace Lee Boggs how much safer, livelier, and more peaceful our communities would become if we reorganized education in this fundamental way—instead of keeping children isolated in classrooms, engage them in community- building activities with audacity and vision: planting community gardens, recycling waste, creating alternative transportation and work sites, naming and protesting injustices around them, organizing neighborhood arts and health festivals, broadcasting a radio show, rehabbing houses, painting public murals. By giving children and young people a reason to learn beyond the individualistic goal of getting a job and making more money, by encouraging them to exercise their minds and their hearts and their soul power, we would tap into the deep well of human values that gives life shape and meaning.