manipulatable, but to see them as human beings much like yourself and to open your eyes to that. >> host: as individuals. >> guest: as individuals and as members of the community both, and that's one of the tensions of teaching right there, if you're teaching third grade and you have 25 kids, you have a responsibility to see each one as the one and only, indupe lick bl, no one else will ever trod the earth quite this way, and that's essential. on the other hand, they're members of a community and you have to figure out how to help them learn to live together, so it's both. >> host: throughout your books on teaching and on being an educator, you always -- social justice seems to be a theme throughout all those books. in fact, one of your books is called "teaching for social justice" what do you mean by that 1234. >> it's taken on the tone of something special, but what i mean is very simple which is that teaching in a democracy, at

least theoretically, is teaching quite a different, it's quite a different approach to teaching than teaching in any kind of authoritarian or autocratic system. whatever they teach in fascist germany or russia or apartheid south africa, and those systems incidentally all wanted their kids to stay away from drugs and crime, show up on time, learn the subject matters, you know, all those kinds of things which we want as well, but there's something distinctly different about teach anything a democracy, and the difference is social justice. one way to puts put it is whater else they teach, they teach social conformity. whatever else we teach, we should be teaching the democratic ideal that each human being is precious, indupe lick bl, to be treated with utter

respect and with profound human rights. so we start from a different angle, and so whatever else we teach, we want to teach initiative, courage, imagination, creativity, entrepreneurship, things like that. >> is there any case in your view in a democracy where teaching should include conformity and discipline? >> guest: well, of course, we have to be disciplined to live together. that requires a kind of discipline. the question is, where does the discipline come from, and how is it structured and organized? if you create a classroom which is absolute chaos, nobody has an opportunity to learn at all. but if as your fundamental value in your class room is one of the things we're going to be doing here is respecting each individual and learning to live together, that means again and again and again you have teachable moments. you have a moment when somebody makes a cruel comment. you have a moment when somebody tears up somebody else's work,

you have a moment when somebody makes a racial slur. these are teachable moments, they are moments when we use the occasion of whatever has happened to open a conversation about what's fair, what's just, what's democratic. that's the distinction i make between teaching in a democracy and, say, teaching in apartheid south africa. >> host: well, in "to teach" you write standardized tests should come with printed warnings: use of these materials may be hazardous to your intelligence or the life chances of half of those taking these tests will be narrowed. >> guest: yeah, i did write that. >> host: why? >> guest: i apologize. because i think, frankly, standardized tests -- i wrote that about 10 or 15 years ago, and frankly, it's gotten so much worse. we have reduced education which is always about opening doors, opening mienldz, opening possibilities, opening visions

and new horizons, we've reduced that to the taking of a single cognitive test that's culturally biased, that narrows the curriculum, and we've gotten to a point after kind of eight years of following this regimen pretty viciously, we've gotten to a point where the only kids who have access to music and sports and debate and the arts and science are kids who either live in privileged suburbs or go to private schools. kids in the city are increasingly being denied that opportunity, and that's the result of a singular obsession with a silly standardized test. so the question i ask about standardized tests in the book and i've asked it really all my life as a teacher, who benefits? who doesn't benefit? who profits? and frankly, i think these standardized tests are a mistake, and they're a mistake because of our obsession with them and our, you know, reifying of them. they represent something, but that something is quite narrow.

>> host: could you give an example, bill ackiers, of what you mean by cultural bias? >> guest: sure, when my kids were young, my kids are all grown and i have a couple of granddaughters now, but my oldest son took a test, there was a picture of people sitting on a porch, and it said the people are sitting on the, and then they had three choices one of which was a porch. now, the kids that i was teaching at the time had never seen a porch, never heard of a porch, never encountered a porch in their own reading, in the stories they'd been read, so how are they to answer that? now, of course, i grew up with a porch, so i might be able to answer that quite easily. what if we gave a test to kids in central iowa where we drew a set of rectangular boxes and we said the people are live anything living in the, and we

gave three choices one of which was projects? not one of those kids would get it right because it's a cultural thing. that's not about ability, that's about experience and cultural background. so again and again what we're testing for -- and this is the shame of it, and it's the shame that somehow dares not be spoken -- but the shameover standardized tests is they tell us what we already know. the clearest indicator is how you did on the first one you ever took. the clearest indicator of how you'll do on the first one is the educational level and income of your participants. that's a pretty horrible statement for an educator to swallow because i don't want to say to my kids, okay, line up. how much do your parents make? okay, you stand over there. how far did your parents go in school? you stand over there. i want to believe as an educator i can make a difference in the life experiences and opportunities of kids, but i can't do it if i'm obsessing every day and if my job depends

on my kids' scores on this test. >> host: well, bill ayers is our guest on in depth this month, and we're going to put the phone lines up on the screen. if you want to participate in our conversation, we're live in chicago. we're at the corner of south state street and congress, just south of the loop in downtown chicago, and this is "the chicago tribune"'s printer's row lit fest that is going on this weekend. we also have a studio audience here joining us at the university center where we are doing our live in depth. 202-737-0001 if you live in the east and central time zones and would like to talk with bill ayers, 202-737-0002 for those of you in the mountain and pacific time zones, and we'll begin taking your calls in just a few minutes, but first we want to look at some of mr. ayers' books on education. "teaching toward freedom" is one of his book, another one is called "zero tolerance: resisting the drive for punishment in our schools."

we have teaching the personal and political, essays on hope and justice. "city kids and city schools," now, these are books that are edited. this is "city kids and city teachers" and this is more reports from the front row. these are just some of his education books, and we'll get into some of his other books, also, as we go. this is "to teach" which also includes the myth of education. what are some of the myths of education? >> guest: gosh, i wrote that 15 years ago. your asking me to remember? [laughter] >> host: yes, i am. >> guest: when i wrote the book, i was taken with the fact that when you go to college, it's about getting an education, when you become a teacher, you get surrounded by some of these myths, and some of them are like these are the toughest kids, the worst kids. that's been said by every generation ever, and now that

i'm old i feel myself wanting to say it about young people today, it's just not true. kids are kids. kids experiment, kids try things, kids do things, and so one myth is kids today are different than ever before. another myth is that i remember writing is teaching should be fun. and, you know, i argue that it can be deeply satisfying, it can be, you know, enormously rewarding, but the idea that a teacher should be fun seems to me a little bit like you put on a clown costume and dance around. that doesn't strike me as particularly correct. you know, one of the myths that i am very concerned about is what i call the myth of the third grade, and that's the idea that the way i often think about it is every fourth grade teacher in the chicago public schools besides being angry at the kids and the parents is angry at who? the third grade teacher because the kids aren't ready. and every high school teacher is angry at elementary school

teachers and as a professor, i'm mad at everybody because the kids aren't ready. [laughter] we have this notion that there's this kind of, you know, some place on mount olympus, there's the ideal third grader who does everything just right. it's not true. third graders are various. i've known kids in kindergarten who could read and others who were still wetting their pants, who were wetting their panels while reading. it's this idea that there's a standard we should all live up to, and it's only, incidentally, k-12. after that we're a mess, i'm 65 years old, and the range of what it means to be a normal 65-year-old is huge, it's not narrow. i argue that third graders are various and you have to learn to teach to the variety that comes into your classroom. >> host: saul stern in the "wall street journal" last october wrote that mr. ayers is not a school reformer. he is a school destroyer. he still hopes for a revolutionary upheaval that will

finally bring down american capitalism and imperialism, but this time around mr. ayers sows the seeds of resis dance and rebellion in america's future teachers. >> guest: wow, that's pretty heavy. you know, i don't know what he means about this time around. i've been a teacher since 1965, so it's a long time, and i've always thought that teaching is, you know, teaching at its best is geared dwardz, as i said, democracy and social justice, and i also think that it's, that progressive education -- and i consider myself a progressive educator -- stands, you know, as it ought to against the status quo. because the status quo is unacceptable. in the city of chicago, we still have close to a 50 percent dropout rate. that's unacceptable, and that's a system we need to change. and, you know, in the quote you read i think it's also true that schools do serve social systems. that's why, you know, and when i talked a few minutes ago, i

said, you know, soviet schools serve the soviet system, fascist schools serve the fascist system, and at least theoretically we want a more perfect democracy, and, therefore, we want more democratic schools. >> host: on your web sierkts bill ayers.org, you are not a fan or arne duncan, the secretary of education. you write he is a failed superintendent of schools. >> guest: well, i wrote a piece for the huffington post. actually i like arne very much. what i said, the line you're quoting is that, says that it was almost inevitable that the new president would choose from, and then you quoted me correctly, from one of the four failed urban superintendents. and what i meant by that is that michelle rhee in washington, d.c., joel klein in new york, paul value las in new orleans and arne duncan in chicago, none of those four superintendents have actually shown that they can actually make a system work.

what they have got is tremendous public relations. so i go on in that piece to talk, for example, about michelle rhee who's the most ideological of the four. arne is probably the most practical, the most pragmatic of the four and probably of those four the best choice that obama could have made. but i describe a cover story in thyme magazine where michelle rhee is featured on the cover, and i don't know if you know michelle rhee, but she's a 39-year-old superintendent, and she's got a very -- the picture on the cover is she's carrying a broom, and she looks very mean, and it says how to fix america's schools. and the pivotal paragraph in the time magazine story says this: michelle rhee has done more to reform the washington, d.c. schools in a year and a half than most reformers can do in five years: she's closed 29 schools, fired 139 teachers, fired 39 principals, fired 200

central office staff. period. not a word in that paragraph about bringing resources into that starving system, not a word about turning around dropouts, not a word about connecting the schools to the community, not a word about supporting the stability of teachers. and the reason i say they're failed is time magazine calls that reform because those are all proxies for reform if you buy the idea that schooling is a business. i don't buy that idea. not in a democracy. in a democracy schooling is a right and a journey, it's a human right. so that's the argument i have, and it's not meant to be a putdown of arne duncan at all, i wish him well. >> host: bill ayers, how did you become a teacher? >> guest: i became a teacher in 1965, i had been arrested in a -- weird, i know, but it's true. [laughter] i was arrested in a sit-in at the draft board in ann arbor, michigan, and i went to jail and in the jail i met a man who had also sat in on the draft board.

and remember, this is early right in the beginning of the war when the war was quite popular in the united states. but we thought that we had to stand up and object, and we did. i met a man whose wife had just founded a little free school affiliated with the sil rights niew., so i walked out of jail into my first teaching job, and for me because of that experience school and teaching has always been linked to, you know, the quest for a better world, the world of peace, of justice, of balance, of stability, yeah. >> host: and this was a preschool? >> guest: yeah. went into a preschool which added a grade a year, and i think we got up to first or second grade. >> host: how many students and where was it? >> guest: ann arbor, michigan, it was in the basement of a friends center, a quaker meeting hall, and i think we had maybe 35, 40 kids. >> host: and you did not have a degree at the time? >> guest: now, i didn't have a -- no, i didn't have a degree,

i was 20 years old. >> host: and was this an accredited school? >> guest: yes. we had one certified teacher. >> host: what about your education, what was your education like? >> guest: i grew up in the western suburbs of chicago, went to suburban schools, good schools. in my junior year i went to lake forest academy, so i went to residential prep school and from there to the university of michigan. >> host: how did you end up at lake forest academy? >> guest: you know, i write about it in one of my books. i jokingly refer to lake forest academy as a kind of reform school for kids with privilege. [laughter] it's not literally true. i was, i was disenchanted with school as a lot of 16-year-olds are, i was disconnected from school. my girlfriend had gone away to college, and i saw no purpose in going to school, so my father thought that was a bad choice and looked around for some alternatives, and he had the

means to take that alternative. >> host: were you a child of privilege? >> guest: very much so. >> host: why? >> guest: well, my dad was the chairman of commonwealth edison in chicago which was the electric monopoly. i don't know what it's called anymore. i still get bills from them, but i'm not sure what the name of it is. [laughter] >> host: how do you go from being the son of the chairman of commonwealth edison to a fugitive? >> guest: just lucky, i think. [laughter] well, you know, it was a particular time in american history, and i do, in fact, feel lucky to have grown up at a time when, you know, in a sense my future was mapped out, my, you know, path was laid out before me, and it was 1963 when i graduated from high school. i went to michigan, i got caught up in the civil rights movement which was actually even in prep school interestingly, you know, speaking of the power of books, james baldwin penetrated lake forest academy and hooked me,

and to this day i have a special affection for james baldwin because he awakened me in a way that yirnt -- you know, when your awakended, you're not aware of what you're about to be awakened to. but he brought the civil rights movement into my privileged, padded all-white, all-male prep school, and i was very taken with james baldwin. went out of to michigan, got involved in the student nonviolent coordinating committee, and then the war began, the war blew up. and i found myself drawn into the antiwar protests. i didn't know much, but instinctively, intuitively i felt there was something wrong with the united states going 10,000 miles away to pick up the failed french colonial mission and the rest kind of followed from that. >> host: who was or is ruthie stein? >> guest: ruthie stein, in fugitive days, was a woman who

had, was an older radical who i really loved and learned from. she passed away many years ago. i don't remember in what context i bring her up there. >> host: she was the artist at the university of michigan who, from my reading of fugitive days, got you involved in the antiwar movement -- >> guest: ah, yes, because i wrote it ten years ago. she was someone who was from new york and a lot more sophisticated than i was, and i had quit school and joined the merchant marines when i was 19, and when i came back from a estimate in the merchant marines, i went back to the campus. i reconnected with her, and she took me to my first antiwar meeting, yeah. >> host: in my reading, and tell me if this is fair, bill ayers, in my reading of fugitive days it seems as if you drifted into the antiwar movement. is that a fair statement? >> guest: i mean, you know, in

some sense. i mean, i think that all life is a kind of a combination of choice and chance. i mean, i don't think that any of us can look back and say with any clarity i made this deliberate choice and then that deliberate choice. the first choice you didn't make is who are your parents. you were kind of cast into the world without making that choice, but, you know, take my life. i mean, i was cast into the world, in a world of privilege and so on. i was cast into a world of nuclear weapons. i didn't have any choice about that. but i did have a choice once i awakened to the fact of deciding whether i would be a person who opposed nuke already weapons, and from the age of about 18 i've been a vocal opponent of nuclear weapons. so that's where choice comes in. but the chance is very important. so to say i drifted, yeah, i drifted, and then i made choices, and then i drifted and made choices. some people have argued that our new president drifted into the presidency, but actually he made some choices, too, didn't he?

>> host: we are in chicago, and this is our in depth program, and i'm going to tell the studio audience if you would like to ask a question f three or four of you would like to get lined up, we're going to begin taking phone calls and questions right now, we'll get to y'all as we take calls, too, and some e-mails that came in during the louisiana week. we cannot take new e-mails, but we do have some that have come in during the past week. our first call comes from california from a caller who's identifying himself as q. please go ahead, q. >> caller: hi, thank you for taking my call. thank you, mr. ayers, you know, for opening this forum up. i have nothing but the greatest respect and appreciation for the sacrifices that you've made. i wanted to, also, i'm a retired special operations disabled vet who was poisoned in iraq due to

depleted uranium shells, and i have grown really disenfranchised with the government, especially the government lying to us. it still denies that my medical condition was related to my combat service, but nonetheless, i wanted to ask you how you felt about the way in which the media portrayed you, especially fox news which seems to have a, a very significant impact on the public's perception with regard to how we cast in terms of the type of light that's cast upon a particular person or event that was covered. i was wondering if you had any particular views at all or experience with how this news operation operates and how that's affected your life. thank you, i appreciate it. >> host: thank you. >> guest: i try very hard to kind of ignore what's said on

fox news in particular, but on any kind of, any kind of media, and i would be, i'm suspicious that there is such a thing as either the public mind or public perception. i think we're all capable of having minds of our own, and i know it seems sometimes like we're all a herd going in a certain direction, but then you look around and you say, gee, it's not so true. for example, for the first three years of this illegal and unnecessary war in iraq, it seemed like the whole country was for it. it seemed that way if you listened to any media outlet. turns out three years in the majority of americans opposed it. so somehow we have minds of our own in spite of public perception or the voices in the media. but, you know, the problem that you're raising about how i was kind of created into a cartoon character during the recent presidential campaign, i didn't take it -- i never took it personally. i felt that there was a sense that nobody knew how to run

against this new, young, fresh candidate, nobody knew what script to put together. and the dishonest narrative that was created first by the opposition within the democratic party and then by the republican party, the dishonest narrative was he's a mystery man, nobody knows who he is, and, look, he hangs around with strange people. the dishonesty of that was partly to create, for example, in the reverend wright who is a respected, important chicago theologian and leader, to create the idea that he was somehow a monstrous, fiery, frightening black nationalist revolutionary. it wasn't true, but that was what was tried to be, you know, created. but the second part of the dishonesty is more profound, and that is this notion of guilt by association. the idea that somehow if you share a boardroom or a bus ride or a cup of coffee, that you also share political perspective, policy outlook, history, experience, you're responsible for one another.

there should be no political litmus test for a politician having a conversation with somebody. one of the great virtues of candidate obama was he would talk to anybody, and he still had a mind of his own. so the idea that talking to strangers or talking to others is somehow a sin, i think, was rejected by the electorate, and i'm glad of that. >> host: bill ayers, we have an e-mail from lawrence. as a former member of the weather underground, how would you advise the obama administration to deal with the problem of global terrorism? are there any lessons to be learned from america's '60s experience in this regard? >> guest: i don't think i would advise the obama administration on much of anything. [laughter] but, but certainly, i mean, i think that one of the things that is true is that there is a world that's profoundly out of balance. and a world that is filled with violence and fear and all the rest of it. the problem is that we've created in the public mind, i

suppose, or in the noisy voices that have dominated the discussion after 9/11, created the notion that there is such a thing as a monolithic thing calls terror that you can kind of deal with by declaring war on it. and that has led us down so many false paths in the last eight years that it's kind of frightening. and we are more at risk today than we were eight years ago precisely because of those policies. so my advice is to all of us, and i don't -- and really it isn't to the obama administration partly because i believe that what matters most is creating the kind of popular will, social movements. that's what changes history. but my advice to all of us is to wake up, open our eyes, recognizing that having a trillion dollar military budget does not actually make us safer. learning to live as a nation among nations makes us safer. and then, of course, we have to

deal with crime and violence, of course, but not as an act of war, as an act of sanity. >> host: mary in kalamazoo, michigan, you're on with professor and author bill ayers. >> caller: hi. quickly before i ask my question, mr. ayers, given your statement you just made how can you still not regret the slaughter of incident americans that yourself, your wife, and the weather underground perpetuated? you left children orphaned, mr. ayers. i'm a lifelong liberal democrat. i grew up in the '60s, i was very idealistic. quite honestly, the reforms in education that we have seen come from the left since the '60s have decimated education. ill literacy rates have skyrocketed, the dropout rate has skyrocketed as a result because we are no longer providing children with a classical education. individual help when they need it. and free and honest discourse.

i've seen education become extremely ideological. we are not allowed to think for ourselves, in fact, we are attacked and censored when we dare deviate from the status quo of the far left. especially in higher education. this is offensive to me as someone who cares about civil rights and social justice rights and freedom. i'll hang up and listen. >> host: bill ayers. >> guest: i'm not sure where to begin except to say that whatever you're referencing about the slaughter of innocents and killing people is not true. i never killed nor injured anyone, and it's, you know, it's part of the narrative of the far right blogosphere as far as i can tell, but it's not true, and it's not true and, therefore, there's no evidence of it, and i wouldn't be here if it were 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 open. kids who are poor, who are the children of immigrants, who are the children of formerly-enslaved people tend 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