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What we need is a gigantic, messy community conversation about what is teaching and learning for the 21st century. We need to engage communities.

Bill Ayers

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Bill Ayers
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: December 26
Autobiographer
Journalist
Peace Activist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Professor
University Teacher
Glen Ellyn
Illinois
William Charles Bill Ayers
William Charles Ayers
Needs
Engage
Communities
Conversation
Teaching
Learning
Century
Community
Gigantic
Need
Messy

More quotes by Bill Ayers

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Now in my view, if you were to line up the Presidents in the order of who made the greatest accomplishments, you'd put Lyndon Johnson in that arena with both Roosevelts probably, and [Abraham] Lincoln and so on. But the idea that Lyndon Johnson was operating as a free agent and coming up with these ideas on his own is nonsense.
Bill Ayers
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It's the height of the Cold War, but I grew up in apolitical family and politics wasn't on the agenda.
Bill Ayers
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One of the great crimes of the Bloomberg/Klein administration [in New York City] is that they've removed themselves from communities, as if communities have nothing to say about what their needs and aspirations are for themselves and for their children.
Bill Ayers
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Politicians are conservative by nature.
Bill Ayers
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Now teach-ins are fairly common or they become common place. But in 1965, the Students for Democratic Society in Ann Harbor organized the first teach-in. The way it happened was that we were advocating for a strike that we advocated that the faculty should strike in solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle.
Bill Ayers
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Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.
Bill Ayers
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There was a sense of palpable relief that George [W.] Bush was leaving and that the Republicans had slipped back and that was a wonderful feeling.
Bill Ayers
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Lyndon Johnson who was the president who was executing that war, announced in the spring of 1968 that he would not seek the presidency again. He would go to Paris and end the war in Vietnam. Well we were ecstatic.
Bill Ayers
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I wanted a racially just society. I wanted to end wars. I wanted to end white supremacy. I wanted to create a world that was based on egalitarianism, sharing, racial justice.
Bill Ayers
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Students for a Democratic Society was founded in 1961.
Bill Ayers
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Nothing is more boring than some old person going on and on about the way things used to be.
Bill Ayers
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I came back to Ann Harbor, got caught up with people who were much more sophisticated than I, and it was an exciting time because my eyes were opening and that's always exciting and Michigan is the place where we had the first teach-in against the war.
Bill Ayers
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I found the place where I was beaten bloody forty years earlier and dragged to jail and that made me cry. When the family came out, that made me cry, and the reason I had a hard time leaving Grant Park was that to see a million people like that, feeling the way that million people felt, was so exhilarating.
Bill Ayers
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That's what [Abraham] Lincoln said. The white man will always be above the black man. I don't want them to run for office, or have political rights, or vote. I want them to go back to Africa.
Bill Ayers
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Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, once asked, How shall we respond to the dreams of youth? It is a dazzling and elegant question, a question that demands an answer--a range of answers, really, spiraling outward in widening circles.
Bill Ayers
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I knew Barack Obama, absolutely. And I knew him probably as well as thousands of other Chicagoans.
Bill Ayers
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In terms of my own behavior and activity, the funny thing about regrets and saying I'm sorry, is that there's so much I would do differently and want to do differently moving forward.
Bill Ayers
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Education is a right, it's a journey, it's a process, and it's something we have to stand for, as hard as it is.
Bill Ayers
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There's something so remarkable in the intensity of taking care of somebody who can't take care of him or herself. And then watching that little person bloom into adolescence.
Bill Ayers
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Beginning to dismantle the Pentagon would save $1 trillion a year - a small government proposal if ever there was one.
Bill Ayers