true. so that's to say that. i'm not sure that i would oppose the notion of a classical education. i think it's a mistake, and i don't, again, know what the evidence is to say that somehow the far left took over education. where in chicago can we point to a school that the far left took over? i wouldn't even know exactly what that would look like, but the fact is that our educational system today is much as it was 60 years ago, and that is that some people succeed brilliantly, and some people fail miserably, and you can track that success and failure along the lines of traditional privilege and oppression. you know, privileged kids get a fine education. there's no doubt about -- they always have, and they go on to have their life opportunities opened. kids who are poor, who are the children of immigrants, who are the children of formerly enslaved people dend not to do

as well, and that's been true for as long as i've been a teacher. >> host: mr. ayers, we've gotten several e-mails along this line and want to read these and let you just respond and talk about it now. jesse leavenworthover terryville, connecticut, still waiting for mr. ayers to reject his past in bomb making and terrorism. did he realize and does he realize even now that innocent people who had nothing to do with his target organizations could be hurt by his tactics? and ken e-mails in, why does bill ayers think that bombing the u.s. capitol and police stations was a good idea? >> guest: well, let me go back, and i'll have to take a minute to talk about this because, you know, the fact is that as i said, i was arrested in 1965 opposing the war. at that point something like 75 or 80 percent of americans supported the war. i worked for the next three years to a pose the war from

1965-1968, those three years. i worked constantly as an organizer, as an activist to try to stop that war. a lot of things happened in the three years from 19 # 5-1968, and by 1968 a majority of americans opposed the war. what happened? well, antiwar activists were part of the story. probably the least important except important to me because i was one. more important than that was the black freedom movement came out in large numbers to oppose the war. martin luther king certainly from 1965-'68, read his speeches. he calls the u.s. government the greatest purveyor of violence on earth. he calls for, he calls the war illegal. he risks all of his prestige and his allies to make the point that the war is wrong morally, ethically, that it's illegal, and that it's a travesty and a catastrophe for the world. he says in april 4, 1967, we need to get on the right side of the world revolution. i mean, it's hard to believe

because of the mythologizing of king, but king was a very powerful and important antiwar spokesperson. muhammad ali, why did he lose his title? because he would not go into the army, and he made very harsh and strong statements about it. the student nonviolent coordinating committee, the people who led the sit-ins and freedom rides. they said no black man should go 10,000 miles away to fight for so-called free come he -- freedom he doesn't enjoy in mississippi. and we are seeing this replayed again, vets came home and told the truth, and that's all they had to do is tell the truth about what they saw, what they witnessed, what they experienced, and the disillusionment of hugh, who called earlier, was a common feeling among people my age as they returned from vietnam. i had a brother in the service, i had classmates in the service, cousins in the service. they were so disillusioned that they joined the antiwar movement

in droves. so john kerry, to take one famous example, john kerry denounced the war to the senate threw his medals at the congress, said i don't want these medals, and then tried to live it down, and i think to his discredit, really, when he ran for president. so you have this amazing development of an antiwar movement powered by vets, powered by the black movement, powered by young people and comes 1968 lyndon johnson for those of you who are young, he was the president then. i know we don't teach history, it's one of the things we've forgotten, but lyndon johnson announced at the end of march in 1968 that he would not run for president, he would work to end the war. we celebrated. we were jubilant. thousands of us gathered in the center of campus and had just a party all night long because we'd won. three years of war, a miserable war, an illegal war, a million deaths, but we'd won. and then five days later king is

dead and two months after that, kennedy is dead. and a few months after that, not only is the war not going to end, the war's going to escalate, and here's the problem. every week that the war goes on there will be another 6,000 deaths. every week. so what do you do? this is a crisis for democracy, it's a crisis for the antiwar movement. in my own family, in my own family people made a range of choices. we were all against the war. one of us ran away to canada to get out of the madness. one of us joined the democratic party, tried to build a peace wing within it. some people went to the communes, some people went to the factories, and i did what i did and have never said and certainly in "fugitive days" you will not find, you know, a statement that says what we did was brilliant or right or perfect, but frankly, the 6,000 people a week dying i still don't know what was right. the only thing i'm certain of is

people who did nothing were wrong and 350e78 in the antiwar movement who think they did everything perfectly are probably slightly mistake season and delusional. we didn't end the war. it went on for ten years. three million people were needlessly slaughtered. >> host: we have a question in our studio audience. please tell us your name. >> my name is robert, i'm from illinois, a northern suburb, and, bill, i want to thank you for being here. >> guest: thank you very much. >> earlier you were talking about how you view your students and how you teach them, and you mentioned to me an amazing phrase, you said to see to the one and only which is an amazing way to view people. students or whatever. you talked about each human is precious and about respect. and i wanted you to talk a little bit about your view of those thoughts about in our society how we as a social order

view each other relative to these things. is this a declining situation? is it getting worse or where are we? >> guest: thank you very much, robert. i'm not, i'm not qualified to say whether it's getting worse or better. i haven't lived long enough, you know, i'm only 65. but i do think that it's one of the predicaments of the modern world precisely is that is the kind of objectification of one another, the inability to see one another, as you say, as precious on some level. the ineability to see that -- inability to see that means we begin to take human life for granted, and we begin to objectify one another. so that worries me deeply, and i think it's not a new problem, it's a human problem, it's an old problem, but i do think that we're at a point in history where we can, we can say, look, 1948 was a watershed year in the world, the year of the universal

declaration of human rights. that was a watershed year coming out of the horror of world war ii, the horror of nuclear weapons being dropped, the horror of the holocaust, and coming to a point where we could say to one another, we must start, we must begin by saying each one is precious, each one is the only one who will trod the earth. so in "fugitive days" this is what i was saying a minute ago, i talk about the fact that whenever i go to the vietnam wall in washington, and i go whenever i'm in washington, it makes me weep because there are 60,000 young americans on that wall. and the other part that makes me weep is that there are three million indoe chinese missing from the wall. why are they missing? doesn't each one of them have a father and a father? isn't each one of them somebody who had someone who cared for them? why are they invisible to us? and frankly, i think that this is something that we, this is a

function of so many things. certainly the speed of the modern world, certainly the pressures we're all under, certainly mass communication. but it's also, i think, a deeply ancient and human problem, how do we see beyond our tribal and national and racial and gender affiliations and see one another as people with hopes and dreams and aspirations and skills and capacities and futures that have to be taken into account if we're going to live in a fully human world? >> host: bill ayers is the husband of bernardine dohrn who will be joining us in our last hour here on in depth, and a book that they edited and a lot of their writings are in this book. this was just put out a couple years ago, "sing a battle song," and we'll talk with her about that when she gets here. lisa in honolulu, thank you for holding, you're on with bill ayers. please go ahead with your

question. >> caller: hello, hello, i'm here from hawaii. >> guest: wish i were there. >> caller: i want to thank you so much because, you know, everything that you pinpoint, it's such an amazing grace that is being heard because my children and me with the economy and everything the basic thing is we were brought up to know the white law, but the difference is we are an economy with a mixed plate, so we all got along. and yet i'm in hawaii, my family's before me, even though we come down from the descendents, we were all living, all getting along, and our word was take care of your, of your being responsible with the land. you want to be treated that way, then you treat them. but it's basically take care of ourselves like we take care of our land because we need to eat and everything, but we all got along. somehow, like you said, when the

war came even though all of these different races came and they put their time out to go to the war, now, difference is they had all different races, all different speak, but they had one focus is to turn around and say to people, the people of the united states and our forefathers before us, especially abraham lincoln. i can see what you are doing, and i pray and pray for you to give you the wisdom and a shield that you can continue in your works. and i just wanted to tell you my question is are you needing -- i know what you're doing, and i praise you. but the thing is i know what you've got to do, and it's going to be a big task. but the good thing is you're telling them this is what it is. don't judge me because only god judge me. >> host: we're going to have to leave it there. thank you very much. bill ayers. >> guest: well, thank you very much, and, you know, what you

make me think of is a couple of things. one is when you talk about, about, you know, the recognition of your own life, your own people, your own land, i saw a documentary friday night on undergraduate at the university of chicago. i saw this documentary film festival that was just undergraduate kids who had made documentaries, and they were all very short, and the one that just broke me up was a two-minute sequence with a young woman what who was an iraqi vetd she started by talking about how beautiful iraq is and the beauty of the land and the people and how every morning she made a point of getting up so she could see the spectacular sun sunrise, and she saw the sunset and had all of her troops stop and watch the sunset because it was so beautiful, and then the contradiction of living in a war in that spot. and as she talked, she kept trying to keep a brave face and say how beautiful it was and have a strong upper lip, and she

deteriorated before our eyes. she broke into tears, and she said, why were we doing it? what were we up to? what was it about? and the rest of the thing is her going to pieces. so i think we ought to recognize that war, whatever you think about the, you know, standing way back here and looking at the heroism and the glory of it, there's nothing glorious about it, and we should do everything we can to avoid it. the other thing that you make me think just very quickly is that you mentioned lincoln and some of our great leaders. one of the things i think a lot about with the election of a new president, new administration is the fact that often -- the interesting thing about this new president, incidentally, and there's been a lot said about the first african-american president which is unbelievably fantastic. i still find it kind of surreal every morning i wake up and wonder did it really happen, and the, you know, a generational shift, get the old people out of here including me, you know, and let some young people -- but most important, here's a community organizer.

here's a guy, and you can't think of a president in american history who would be comfortable knocking on the door of a public housing project on the south side and going in and having a conversation. this person did that for years. but more importantly, when he was asked during the campaign who would martin luther king support and his response was king wouldn't support any of us, he'd be in the streets building a movement for justice. and it seems to me that pruts a press -- puts a press on us because it's one thing to say what should the obama administration do, it's quite another to say what should we do? what did you do this morning for peace? and it reminds me that lincoln never belong today an abolitionist party. and, you know, fdr wasn't part of the labor movement, and president johnson wasn't part of the black freedom movement. but they did stroornt things when extraordinary things were demanded because of something else, and the something else exists in this room, exists in this television audience.

it's us. and i think here's a president who understands that. so why don't we all leave immediately and go get busy? no, i'm just kidding. [laughter] >> host: bill ayers is the co-author of this book, "race course against white supremacy" along with bear bernardine dohr. >> caller: hi, i'm calling in regards to martin luther king in oakland. i've been back in that class last month, how can you go over this when you just have a piece of paper and a pen? all the money goes to the rich people in oakland. now, we are very highly educated, and you were illegally ripped out of your place. if you go to help people around here like i did, i'm getting evicted right now. i left my husband, government took all my money, took away my medical. back at '68 when i was 5 and a

half, the war, martin luther king, i have the police tried to shoot me then. i'm trying everything possible. we are good people, we're looking for fair. the reason why the white supremacists are afraid is because they've made us the third party. we do all the work, and they take all the money. you couldn't lift the toilet seat if it wasn't for the black man. so i would like a full investigation, where does the money go? so don't be little our people. we don't have the tools, so i'm asking in god's name, he's the only one. i go to court june 19th over false aggravation. we are prisoners of our own body, but god bless and have a nice, enjoyable life because i've never seen a man with the fear of stopping now. that's what it is. you guys have been in control, you guys took my land and everything. we have no say so, but i'm not a prisoner. i will die for my rights, so, therefore, right now i have them

taking away my medical and insurance, so tell me what i'm supposed to do? >> host: bill ayers. >> guest: thanks for your call. i don't have any real advice. i mean, fight back, speak up, and you are, and good luck. >> host: diane, las vegas. you're on with bill ayers. diane, you with us? >> caller: take every chance i get to tell people about no child left behind that requires children to take tests at grade level even if they're in special ed, and then the school is found nonproficient because the special ed children do not make their annual, yearly progress that compares their test scores to last year's students' test scores. it does not test how much they've learned. and i feel that it's an intended failure, the intent to fail public schools.

>> guest: you know, the no child left behind is the federal legislation that i think is right now up for reauthorization, and even conservative critics like diane and chester finn have said if we reauthorize it in the current form, it's going to be the death of public education. it's going to mean that only a very tiny minority of kids are going to get an education for citizenship, an education for full participation in our society. we ought to reject it, we ought to reject it because of its single-minded obsession with standardized testing. one way, i talked earlier about the way in which a democracy is powered by this fragile but precious ideal that each person is of incalculable value, and if you go and look at the 1948 declaration of human rights, article 26 is about education. and it said everyone has a right to an education. no one should be excluded from that right. so in a place like chicago where

we have suspensions and expulsion ls gone crazy, we ought to relook at that as a human right. people have a right to the full development of their full severals, not aing so anitive strain that's very narrow. so one other way of looking at it that i think is important and just in terms of what diane said is one way to kind of ask yourself what standard do we want to hold in terms of education is we could say that whatever the most privileged and the wisest parents want and get for their kids, that's what we as a community want for all kids. and that means that the kind of savage inequalities where we fund some schools in illinois to the tune of $40,000 per kid and, you know, per kid, per year and some schools have $4,000 per kid per year, that should offend us as people who believe in democracy because what does that say to kids? our policy is, you know, choose the right parents. if you choose the right parents, everything will be great. if you choose the wrong parents,

there's not much we can do. that's offensive in a democracy, so we should correct that, and part of correcting that is to say whatever the most privileged and wisest parents have, that's what we want in chicago. so i don't want more than what people have in one place, i just want austin high school to be a lot like new traer. >> host: who is maxine green? >> guest: she's my mentor, she's now i want to say 92 years old, still has more than all of her marbles, sill -- still the smartest person i know. >> host: and what is this book that you edited? >> guest: i edited a book called "the light and dark times," and it's people who have learned from maxine greene, it's people who have been influenced by her writing about the influence of her thinking on their work.

and maxine greene was, i was 40 years old when i met her. i had gone to get a doctorate when i was 40, right, i had gone back to school, and she was my main professor. and she was a very powerful person whose message was always that more or less had to do with we should begin to see the world as if it could be otherwise, and then we should act on our imaginative capacity to imagine a fairer, more just, more peaceful, more balanced world. and she had a big impact on my thinking about teaching. >> host: austin thompson e-mails in, being that you're a veteran of the movement for alternative education, what do you make of president barack obama's new emphasis on charter schools? >> guest: i'm not sure i know what the emphasis is going to be from the new administration, but i think, you know, charter schools, i think anything that

takes away from the public space is a mistake. a lot of the people who are, who are pushing for charters and who work in charters are great, great people, so let's make a distinction. but on the other hand, haven't we seen what the ideology about provetizing everything -- provetizing everything, where it takes us? do we really want to go to privatizing public else in the same way that we've privatized the health care system has been privatized forever, and it's a catastrophe? so why would we take that model as the model of where we ought to go? again, the ideology that's taken control of us or the met for that's -- metaphor that's dominated our thinking about education is that schooling is a lot like a product. education is something you buy and sell in the marketplace like a box of bolts or a refrigerator. it's not true. it's a false metaphor. if you buy the metaphor, then the kinds of things that are said in praise of michelle rie

make sense, you know, kill the union and privatize all the services. but it's not true. what we need is to build a more robust public space, a more robust public system, and charters are not really proven in the last few years to be part of that. >> host: what is your day job? >> guest: my day job. [laughter] gosh. i have so many. my day job is i'm a professor at the university of illinois at chicago, and i've been there for 22 years, so i began proffering when i was 43. but, you know, i think of my work, you know, really as the work of an act risk is -- activist, and it continues to be that even though i do a lot of writing and teaching and sponsoring dissertations and all the rest of what a professor does. but i have thought of myself for most of my adult life primarily as a political and social activist. >> host: what were you teaching last semester? >> guest: well, i just finished this week, and so i'm so

exhausted i don't even want to talk about it. no, i'm just kidding. [laughter] any professor who whines about being a professor ought to be taken out and given a real job. in fact, i have three sons, but my middle son, malik, is a middle school math and science teacher, and whenever he talks to his two professor parents and his writer brother and his law student brother he says, will you people please be quiet? some of us have a real job, and i accept that. teaching middle school math and science is a real job. [laughter] last semester i taught four courses. i taught a course in narrative research which i teach every spring. i taught a course which is a required course in the masters program called improving learning environments. i taught a seminar in teaching for a cohort of people who were career changers. and i taught a course in writing memoir to 17-year-olds. wow. 17-year-olds writing memoir, let

me tell you. how much have they done? more than you'd imagine because it's all here. >> host: we've got about two hours left in our program with bill ayers left here on in depth. we're live at the chicago tribune's printers row lit fest they're calling it, and we're at the corner of south state street and congress just about a block from where the festival is taking place. this is where a lot of the author events take place. we're going to take a couple more calls, get some audience questions. next call comes from james in medford, oregon. >> caller: hello. i wanted to know with a yes or no question, if possible, since what i've mostly heard about you from what you said about the clinton administration and fox news if you believe that you are rightly labeled a terrorist f that is a true assumption, or that you have committed a

terrorist act? that's my question. >> guest: no. >> host: do you care to expound on that answer? >> guest: you know, he wanted a yes or no answer. [laughter] well, i mean, i can. >> host: in the 1960s, bill ayers, were you considered a terrorist, and do you looking back consider yourself during those years, during the '60s and early '70s as a terrorist? >> guest: no, absolutely not, and i didn't consider myself that then, and i don't now because if you take a stable definition of terror, and one of the problems since 9/11 we created this mythology of the war on terror which always struck me as odd. you might remember there was a fierce debate after 9/11 about how to understand what had just happened to us, and there was no doubt that it was a crime against humanity, that it was a pure act of terror by a group of, you know,

idealogically-driven religious fanatics and that we had suffered something horrible as not only the 3,000 who died although certainly them and their families, but all of us. so what was it? many people in those first six months said it is a crime against humanity. it should be dealt with as a criminal justice problem, but the loud voices, the dominant voices said, no, it's a war on terror which struck me as a little odd because it's a war on a tactic, and where is terror? everywhere. anywhere. how do you fight it? with everything, with invasions. how many countries will we invade? i'm not sure, but several. so you end up in this kind of dead-end kind of thing. war without end, war without meaning against a tactic that could come from anywhere. if you take a stable definition of terrorism, something like the violence or the threats of violence against a population, assassinations, kidnappings in order to influence the direction

of policy, then you would have to say the american war in vietnam was a pure act of terror. in my view it was a terrorist war. we tried to resist that war by breaking the law, as i said i broke the law in 1965, i have continued to break the law consistently for the next several years. i was arrested many times, i destroyed draft files, i committed extreme acts of vandalism, but i never thought of them as terror because they weren't directed at randomly hurting people in order to influence policy. so, no, i wasn't a terrorist. when we went underground, we cross lines of propriety, we crossed lines of common sense, you could say they were despicable acts if you'd like to, but i think if you say they were despicable acts, you ought to also add it was pretty despicable to be killing 6,000 people a week. so i don't in the book, again, i don't defend what we did, i try as most literary memoirs do, try

to understand how this guy got there, how this son of privileged got into that spot and did the things that he did. but i don't defend it, and i don't -- but i do try to understand it. so, no, i was not a terrorist, we were not terrorists, we were never charged with terrorism, we were never charged with hurting people which is kind of, again, the fox news narrative or with trying to hurt people because we didn't. >> host: before we leave the topic of education, of all your education books that you've written or edited which would you recommend to people to read if they wanted to read one? >> guest: well, the one that is most widely read is called "to teach, the journey of a teacher," and it's the one that's read by a more general audience so much so that the third edition is going to be a graphic novel. and i brought chapter one with me. i worked with a 26-year-old cartoonist named ryan alexander