Bill Ayers on teaching

“Education is always and everywhere about opening doors, opening minds, opening possibilities.  Education is about opening your eyes and seeing for yourself the world as it really is in all its complexity, and then finding the tools and the strength to participate fully, even to change some of what you find.”

“Education is, of course, an arena of struggle as well as hope–struggle because it stirs in us the need to reconsider everything we have wrought, to look at the world anew, to question what we have created, to wonder what is worthwhile for human beings to know and experience, to justify or criticize or bombard or maintain or build up or overthrow everything before us–and hope gesturing toward the future, toward the impending, toward the coming of the new.  Education is where we gather to question whether and how we might engage and enlarge and change our lives, and it is, then, where we confront our dreams and fight out notions of the good life, where we try to comprehend, apprehend, or possibly even change the world.  Education is contested space, a natural site of conflict–sometimes restrained, other times in full eruption–over questions of justice.”

“The work, of course, is never done.  Democracy is dynamic, a community always in the making.  Teaching for social justice continues the difficult task of constructing and reinvigorating a public.  It broadens the table, so that more may sit together.  Clearly, we have a long, long way to go.  And we begin.”

From “A Simple Justice” written by Bill Ayers, Mike Klonsky and Gabrielle Lyon.  (This quote is from Bill).