remembered it as a postcard. miles described taking a road trip with a group of young people to birmingham, alabama, to participate in a demonstration. and they saw one of these billboards on the highway, and then, you know, martin luther king at communist training school, and then they saw a second one, and miles was disgusted. but as the third one loomed up in the distance, one of the kids turned to miles and said, that's the dumbest advertisement i've ever seen, it doesn't tell you who to call. so here was the white citizens council, the ku klux klan trying to discredit king, and all they were doing was promoting communist. ..

>> you could go to an oil rig and find five workers sitting round trying to read, trying to write their own stories. what an exciting kind of extraordinary thing. i think learning should go from okayed toll grave. i think it's one of the crazy things about our educational system, it's considered for the young, like the young learn and then what, go on automatic pilot? that's nutty. so i did admire that and i do admire that. so, yeah. i don't find that objectionable. >> host: we have way from the

odd generals. >> i'm from cleveland, and me question is on the educational line which piggybacks on the question the gentleman asked previously. you sort of answered it but you may want to ewill be braid on it. g. the importance of teachers and schools are only as good as teachers, what are your thoughts on how we can recruit, retain and support good teachers and the other side of the coin, teachers teachers teachers who don't believe children can learn or are discouraging and tend to maintain a system that we have, what are your thoughts about how you handle that? >> guest: are you a teacher? >> no. i'm a former schoolboard member and i had to deal with no child left behind and that was -- if i could just put in one other comment, what we can do to enrich our curriculum to get history back. reading and aright me tick and not much else and kills studentses's' in learning. >> guest: you make so many good points we're missing history,

we're missing science. you all know we're missing geography. national geographic did a survey of 18 to 25-year-old american kids and asked them to find certain countries on a blank world map. 80% couldn't find iraq, couldn't final palestine and israel. 40% couldn't find great bait tan and 10% couldn't find the united states. that makes you laugh but the problem is as nelson says through aught to be a rule we capped bomb a country we can't find on a map and that way the level of violence would go down. the question of recruitment. it's a huge and important question, and the problem around the controlling metaphors around education, we have bought into the idea, for example, that teach for america, that tip of program, alternative certification is the way to go i wouldn't defend the status quo because we do a poor job in

colleges of education, but the idea that all we need to do is fix the schools is a smart kid from michigan and goes into the worst school in america and leaves in two years, that's not a model for success. we need to invest in teachers and that means higher pay, that means recognition of the actual work that they do, which is backbreaking and mind-bending. it's the idea of whether they work six hours, for got to about it. teachers work 24-7 many of them for months and months, and so i think we need to pay more, i think we need to create schools in which teachers want to teach by recognizing their intelligence. we need to recognize that professional wisdom and allow that to flourish in schools rather than treat them as if they're mid-level bureaucrats in a factory. so those are broad -- and i should make a distinction.

the kids are going to teach for america are fantastic kids kidsa person. they've wonderful people. it's the system and the theory of change strike mess as wrong. in terms of teachers as they exist here again i want to say that there's a metaphoric shift we node need to make. whenever john mccain stood up and said we need to get the lazy incompetent teachers out of the classroom all of us felt themselves nodding, even me. what are we going to say, no, the incompetitives must stay. of course, he framed the issue. if i stood up and got though microphone first and said every kid in an american public school deserves an intellectually grounded, curious, morally committed, you know, well-paid,well, rayed teacher it would get approval, too. so the question is how do we frame it. i think most people slogging out

their teaches lives in chicago public schools are fantastic. they work in systems that undermine their ability. they don't recognize their intelligence and talent, they don't give them the opportunities opportunities to talk with one another to work with parents that would allow them to be more successful. so we need to change struck tours much more than we need to change the people. >> host: cheetah, texas, please go ahead with your question. >> yes. i want to know what are your three or four most important things for teachers to do. >> host: thank you. >> guest: eye misseddite three or four most important things for a teach tore teach their student or to be with their student in a classroom. >> guest: it's a huge question and we could spend the next several hours talking about it. simply i would say this. the intellectual challenge of

teaching, the ethical challenge of teaching, is to see your students as three ditch mentional creatures, people with hearts, minds, spirits, as per racings, goals, that have to be taken into account. that's not easily done in a system that reduces kids to deficits and kind of thrives on a toxic habit of labeling. so we have kids that are bd, tg, an endless swarm of labels but doesn't get at the heart of this one and only who will ever travel the earth. so your job is to look through all of that confetti and to see the actual human being before you. that's challenge number one. challenge number two is to create an environment that is deep enough, rich enough and wide enough so eave kid -- every kid who walks into your classroom can find something familiar and something to stretch toward. creating an environment is huge, and it's underthized and underthought in colleges of

education and it's ignored often. so if you go into a room and i do all the time, where they desperately want the kids to read, but the room itself is ill literal, there's no books, there's no magazines no words, no time to write. that is -- you're running the environment against your goals, and i learned this as a young teacher. i was 20 years old. i used to take my kids to the detroit metropolitan airport and i had nothing in mind except we would watch the planes take off. i was teaching kindergarten. and we got there -- before there was security and airports turned into malls and they would look at concourse a and i had six five-year-olds or eight five-year-olds with me. what would they do? they would run because a five-year-old seeing a hall like that will run down the hall. well i would chase after them and round them up and the next time we went i would give them sketch books and explain to them they can't run, they have to stay together and i would give

them m & ms if they just stayed together and we got together and you guessed it, they ran. why? because the environment trumped the lesson. and we don't pay attention to that but it's true. the environment tells you to read or not. the environment tells you to cooperate or not. the environment tells you to be a good citizen or not. so, what all this dividing up and ranking kids into winners and losers does is creates conditions we're trying to teach cooperatively is a loser. so creating an environment is huge. and then i think linking teaching to the wider world. there's no way to teaching can exist in a vacuum so we have to open our eyes to a wider world and participate in it. so students should obviously learn to read and write and do arithmetic and history and geography and all the rest but creating that environment, creating a culture of curiosity, culture of learning, goes a long

way towards that goal. >> host: a little bit more than halfway through our in-depth on book tv with bill ayers. we're going to take a short break. we're live from chicago with a studio audience and we will be back with your phone calls and more questions from the audience. [inaudible conversations] >> when i arrived here' and was looking four your office, someone told me it's easy to find because you have all of these things attached to your door, and they tell a lot about my interests which are eclectic, and ever-changing. so this wall here next to my office -- and that wall, what happens is that as things strike my attention and i put them up here, eventually this wall will be covered by clippings and things i find that it think are

worth sharing. my students, who are waiting for office hours, will sit out here and i figure i will give them a whole political education. some of it, of course, is just personal stuff. this is one of my son's plays at juliard. and then the wall grows, there's martin luther king with a powerful quote from may 1967. and so on. and so the wall grows, and then at some point somebody complains, and then the dean sends may note and says, this wall doesn't belong to me. the door belongs to me. but the wall belongs to -- is part of the public square and i have to take everything down. so then i take everything down, and then it starts over. and then the door is similarly, you know, i'm an education professor so i have to have the chalkboard with, i must remember to be cheerful and obedient

written over and over. >> a picture of you here. >> i was in the merchant marines in 1964. i had dropped out of michigan and i joined the merchant marines and that's my identity card. these are my three kids who are grown. he is a teacher in oakland, california. and that's when he was eight years old, and he is now a playwright and a teacher at columbia university. he is an author and a first-year law student at yale. and this is my playwright son and his wife and she is a novelist. and a poet. the place is a little crowded because i have been here 20 years. these are my three kids. those are my three kids. and that's us at our place in california that i mentioned. that's us in california. about 12 years ago, i think. several of my students have

published books. this is a of borders and dreams, a doctoral dissertation. this shelf is for my research class because i teach classes cs qualitative research and we read a lot of examples of qualitative or interpretive research. we try so to see what other people have done. this is a tremendous book about street vendors in new york city and kind of hung out with these guys and became a street vendor. that's the cover of a book i edited, and that woman, maxine green, was my mentor at teacher's college, columbia university. the other book i just found on my desk to show you is the

berkeley high school slang dictionary. this is a dictionary that my brother what just retired as an english teacher put together and it's a very, very smart book about language and the plasticity of language. the opening word is all right, and the final word is zuk, a man dressed in latin style, man, that guy was a real zuk. the best thing i ever did in any life was to raise three extraordinary kids and the most fun i have is taking care of my grandchildren. i have tons of pictures of them. that's one. there's one. >> what's her name? >> dalin. that gives me a lot to do, and i also -- the other thing like about taking care of my granddaughters is that it's not only kind of personally satisfying and wonderful to

watch kids grow up and to watch their minds work and watch them make the connections, you know, that we take for granted and to have them looking at the world in a different way. but also i feel like it's useful because i have these -- my son and my daughter-in-law are extraordinarily hard-working themselves and they're boast artists and kind of in the early parts of their projects and work so it actually i think is of some use and what do you want when you're 65? you want to be of use, so i feel like i am.

>> this summer, book tv is asking, what are you reading? >> the books i would have pulled out if you asked what are you books your reading now or two or three graphic novels. one is fun home. it's a memoir, a graphic memoir by allison beck telewho is famous in a couple of different subcultures because she had an online comic strip called dikes to watch out for and she is a funny, feisty, irreverent,

insurgent artist, and she spent many years working on a memoir, and it's her true story of growing up and coming out as a lesbian, and her parents were enrich teachers so it's a very literary -- the lenses through which some refracts her worker literary lenses, and as she is coming ought as an adolescent she realize her father is a repressed homo sexual and as she makes that discovery he kills himself. so it's a powerful, poignant, funny, incredibly moving book. so allison bechtel is one of my current favorite writers and authors. another book is persepolis about the iranian revolution, and she

is an iranian french woman and it's a very different style but of coming of age at a time of repression and autocracyie in a the traitic nightmare in her country and it has all the adolescent tropes of falling in love and discovering your body and it's again the backdrop of this historic moment. very moving book and those books together show you kind of the great flexibility of the medium and the great things you can do with comics which i don't preen -- pretend to be an expert on comics but it's a terrific medium and one which reaches into all corners of the world that others don't.

>> to see more of summer reading lists and other program information, visit our web site at book tv.org. >> this summer, book tv is asking, what are you reading? >> cnn's wolf blitzer. what are you reading. >> beginning with the empore record's new clothes, written by a well-known washington lawyer, involved in watergate and in the 9/11 commission, the emfor roar's knew clothes i want to get through this book because he has some good stories to tell about what is going on here in washington and what happened over the past several decades. another book is by william coen,

house of cards, a book about wall street that tells the story how the collapse on wall street occurred, what was going on. i have had him on my show. he is really smart and i have read parts of the book already but i want to get through it as a result of what i have heard directly from william cohen. there's a become coming out entitles myths illusions and peace, finding a new direction for america in the middle east by dennis ross, the mideast envoy who is working on iran, and david mccove ski. so i'm interested not what they have to say about the arab israeli conflict. so that's another book i will be going through. another book is by david sanger of "the new york times" entitled

the inheritance, the world obama confronts and the challenges to american power. having read him for years, he is a traffic reporter and now -- a terrific reporter and has put together on what the president of the united states has basically inherited. he has been on my show, he is smart and i think this is going to be an important book. finally, the one fiction that i want to read this summer, i hope to read others but want to read the new book, a mad desire to dance. because he is such a terrific writer and what he writes is so important. i was really moved by what he said a few weeks ago when he spoke openly about having lost his foundation, so much money in the bernard madoff uproar, fiasco. he was so smart and lost millions, but this is a book obviously that continues but he has been writing for so many years about the holocaust so i

want to get through this book if i can this summer. those are the five book is plan on reading. i hope to get through them all and start on more. >> you're obviously a busy man. where do you do your reading? >> i try read before i go to sleep at night. i try to read on weekends. i just go out on my deck in the back yard and just relax, especially if the weather is good. whenever you can. i am a busy guy. but you make time. and it's important. and i really appreciate books. >> wolf blitzer, thank you very much. >> thank you. >> to see more summer reading lists and other program information, visit our web site at book tv.org. >> and we are back live from

chicago with advice month's in-depth program, bill ayers has been our guest for the last two hours and now we're joined by bernadine dohrn, and in the most recent book they co-authored is calls race course against white supremacy. this is the book. first a little bit about bernadine dohrn. how did you get the nickname he paciniera of the lunatic left. >> guest: sometime during the 1970s -- i think the year 1970 when we first became fugitives came up with that idea. so, you know, it was unusual to have women leaders of national organizations and political organizations, so you had to reach around in history and find somebody similar. >> host: what was your role with the weather underground? >> guest: i was the national

leader of sds for -- from 1968 to 1970. and then the weather underground i was part of the team of people that decided to not show up for our court dates and to create an underground. >> host: was that scary when your court date came and went and you weren't there? >> guest: it really wasn't scary. it was rather a relief. we were in a situation in 1969, if i can just conjure it up. those who are from chicago will remember that the level of tension and hostility and violence between the chicago police department and political activists had reached a level that we could have only imagined, the assassination of fred hampton and mark clark, the black panther leaders, that was

covered up by the city and reenacted as if they provoked the attack and the asass mission. constant arrests of white radicals for nuisance events and massive demonstrations against the war which by then was -- who knew it was going to go on for five more years, but about a thousand people a day were being killed in southeast asia, so the level of polarization, in the country, the level of militancy and reresistance was enormous and in that framework, once we kind of dropped out and changes our names and were just trying not to be caught and regroup is what a relief to be outside of that caldron. >> where you grow up? >> guest: chicago, my hometown. eugene field day school on the north side and my parents moved to milwaukee, and i graduated

from milwaukee and this is my 50th reunion year. i'm going back to my 50th 50th reunion for high school. >> whoa are your pains? >> guest: dorothy and barney. i had a wonderful childhood. not money. i'm the first person in my family to go to college. my parents had a high school education. my mom was my dad's secretary. she was orphaned as a kid and passed around. she was swedish. she lived into her 90s. my dad lived to 94. he was born on halstead and about 14th street. he used to go to ho house as a kid. in my later life i drove him by the house as if i were telling him something, and he was like, i came here every day. so my sister and i grew up in loafing household.

they considered themself as mixed marriage because my dad was jewish and my mom was swedessish. their families were not happy with their marriage but they had a good marriage and they wanted better for their daughters. >> host: how did you got involved in the antiwar movement and student activism. >> guest: i watched. i looked at tv and looking at images the newspaper from my safety and security of an all-white high school in milwaukee, and thinking something is going on out here and till was lynched and he was my age and seven youngsters trying to get into:in little rock and they're my age and something is going on. i was -- felt very far away from it but i knew there was a world

i wanted to get to, and it took me quite a while. but right when i started local city university of chicago, -- king came to chicago, and i'm, i'm not going to miss this. and so i volunteered with his lawyer team and i found myself on the west side trying to desegregate the housing and bring the housing that was there up to code. so i wore a little arm band that said lawyer, i was a second-year law student by then. ignorant of the world. so it was a big teaching, eye-opening experience for me. >> host: where did you go to law school and have you practiced. >> guest: i went to the university of chicago law school. i graduated in 1967. there were only six person in the law school in my day, not a single person of color. and every single guy in my class who include, you may be interested know, john ashcroft. >> host: did you know him?