Bill Ayers Asks: What Will Happen If We Consider Education a Human Right, Not a Mere Product
Bill Ayers -- Demand the Impossible!: A Radical Manifesto | Haymarket Books -http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/Demand-the-Impossible
It was great to escape the deplorable, scary election news to spend Friday evening in conversation with Bill Ayers, on a tour to promote his new book, Demand the Impossible: A Radical Manifesto. Ayers is best known for his activity during the turbulent 1960s in the Weather Underground. He spent an entire career after that as distinguished professor in the Department of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. On Friday, Ayers said while he thinks many activists on the left are good at explaining what’s wrong, we need to be better at declaring our deepest values and asking: “What if?” Ayers’ new book makes a plea for re-framing and mobilization across myriad issues, but on Friday he talked some about public education, and one of his new chapters examines ideas about bringing people together to support the great American institution of public schools.
Asked on Friday night how we can go about making a radical turn away from corporate school reform—8 years under Bush—8 years under Obama—and the years that led up to our current catastrophe —Ayers explained what he calls three pillars of corporate school reform—measurement by the single metric of standardized test scores—destruction of the collective voice of teachers, not only their unions but also their voices as professionals—and the privatization of our nation’s great public system of education. In the book he defines the wave of privatization—“The eclipse of the public, the frantic pace of privatization and the fire sale of the public square—the public schools and public housing, prisons and the military, and in Chicago, the bridges and parking meters—all of which represent the triumph of corporate power and a kind of fatal entangling of corporations with the state, leading to a thieves’ paradise in government with the arid ideology of capital and the ‘market’ promoted as the truest expression of authentic participatory democracy.” (p. 11)
To challenge corporate school reform, Ayers suggests, begin with a simple question: “Is education a product to be sold in the market or is it human right?” Some other questions follow. What if we define education as a right for every child? How would that change things? “In what ways is education liberating, and in what ways can schooling be entangling and Bill Ayers Asks: What Will Happen If We Consider Education a Human Right, Not a Mere Product | janresseger:
