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In this article, William Ayers constructs his Phil Smith Lecture as a call to action. Grounded in democratic principles of equality and social justice, the author invokes a liberal conception of human worth and the universal right to educational opportunity. The author critiques the passivity of the American polity in the face of Barack Obama's election and subsequent educational policies. The speech begins by quoting from Bertolt Brecht's poem "Motto," which asks, "In [the] dark times will there also be singing" and answers, "Yes, there will be singing. /About the dark times." Ayers lists examples of the contemporary dark times: climate changes, Tea Party triumphalism, the privatization of the public space, Smithsonian's bowing to anti-intellectualism and art phobia. But, says Ayers, there is much singing in these dark times too, such as those of the mothers at Whittier School in Chicago seizing a field house and demanding a library for their children; the Cochabamba and Cancun gatherings, and the seizing of global environmental leadership from the powerful elites by the marginalized; and Wikileaks and especially Bradley Manning, "the soldier locked in a military dungeon for the crime of truth-telling." Ayers maintains that resisting the war culture and the degrading of democracy is a way to sing the dark times, too. In these and other examples, Ayers references historical symbols of resistance in the face of tyranny and issues a call to mobilization with the goal of realizing democratic ideals in the broader society and education specifically. He argues that we should focus our efforts not on the production of things so much as on the production of fully developed human beings who are capable of controlling and transforming their own lives, citizens who can participate fully in our shared public life. As such, it is argued herein that educators, students, and citizens should demand an education worthy of a democracy. This includes an end to sorting people into winners and losers through expensive standardized tests which act as pseudo-scientific forms of surveillance; an end to starving schools of needed resources and then blaming teachers and their unions for dismal outcomes; and an end to "savage inequalities" and the rapidly accumulating "educational debt," the resources due to communities historically segregated, under-funded and under-served. The responsibility for enacting a democratic society lies with each one of us, he asserts. He further asserts that "in saying goodbye to complacency in a heartless world, to deference, didacticism, ego and the need to always be right," Ayers underscores that activism is not merely verbal and scholarly. It is fundamentally to take action.

In this article, William Ayers reflects on his teaching experiences starting in 1965 when he found that teaching, from his first day until the present, has been linked for him to the persistent longing for freedom, and the never-ending quest for justice. He describes the "Children's Community"--"an experiment in freedom and integration"--housed in a shabby church basement where he began his work. From here he took his students on a multitude of field trips to get them to think and to be bold and adventurous. Trips became a big-letter statement about the centrality of first-hand experience as adventure and investigation and learning. Later in that turbulent and propulsive decade, Ayers became an organizer for the East Side Community Union in the Lakeview section of Cleveland, Ohio. The Community Union was an extension of the Southern Civil Rights Movement into the North--a grass-roots effort to organize disenfranchised and marginalized citizens of the ghetto into a powerful force capable of effectively fighting for their own needs and aspirations. The Community Union lived for only a few years. While it lasted, there was struggle, hope, possibility, occasional heroism, and one of the most loving attempts to change all that is glaringly wrong in society. Ayers observes that changing communities from places of despair to places of hope and action is parallel to efforts to improve schools. Each involves creating a sense that things could be otherwise, awakening aspirations, creating collective capacity, challenging old norms and expectations, and confronting structured relationships of power. He explains how his teaching story, like so many, is punctuated by crisis: How can I possibly succeed in a crowded and underresourced classroom, a place with too many kids, too little time, and negligible support? How could I motivate a group of resistant students who seemed to hate the place? How could I be true to my deepest values and broadest purposes in a place seemingly determined to undermine both? How could I even survive? A large contradiction that productively punctuates much of teaching is the tension of working in real classrooms in real schools and systems while fighting to hold on to and find ways to enact humane values and best thinking about learning and teaching. This is a contradiction Ayers never resolved in his own teaching, but one that he thinks must be acknowledged and addressed continually as a space of struggle, a place to live, a tension to teach into. He argues that by giving children and young people a reason to learn beyond the individualistic goal of getting a job and making more money, by encouraging them to exercise their minds and their hearts and their soul power, teachers would tap into the deep well of human values that gives life a richer shape and meaning and by reorganizing education in this fundamental way, in turn creating safer, livelier and more peaceful neighborhoods and communities.

Critical pedagogy. Whatever insurgent energy once pulsed through those words--giving them life and investing them with power and possibility--has been largely lost, their meaning sapped away with overuse and misuse, reduction and dogmatic application. Yesterday's iconoclasts are often today's icons, and every revolution, large or small, finds a way to destroy its own Utopia. Still, there is a lesson and a message here: now is as good a time as any other to challenge teachers' orthodoxy, to rethink basic principles, to storm their own headquarters. They should act on behalf of their students, themselves, and their deepest hopes for a better world. The authors try to do just that in their work with new teachers at a big city public university. Their purpose is not to indoctrinate them in the discourse of critical pedagogy (or in any other discourse, for that matter), but to join them on a journey as "becoming" teachers, and to encourage them--as they encourage themselves--to remain skeptical, curious, and wide-awake along the way. Their goals for themselves and for their students are as complex, dynamic, and contested as they hope their goals will be as teachers of children: (1) to learn to see students fully and fairly, as three-dimensional creatures much like themselves; (2) to see themselves as active agents of change in their schools and in their worlds; and (3) to find practical application in public school classrooms for their commitment to social justice and human freedom.

This dialogue is an edited version of a dialogue between William C. Ayers and William H. Schubert at the November 10-12, 2011, meeting of the Progressive Education Network hosted by the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago, Illinois. It was the opening keynote session on the evening of November 10. Ayers interviewed Schubert, who acted as John Dewey. The keynote addressed the contemporary relevance of Dewey for today's educational issues in general and in particular for the audience of leaders and teachers in progressive schools. Special focus was placed on both extant criticisms of progressive ideas and practices and the relevance and power of Dewey's ideas for improving education, social action, equity, and democracy today.

In this essay, William Ayers calls for a more vital and effective public education system, one guided by the basic democratic principle that all human beings are of incalculable and irreducible value. Ayers argues that to achieve such a system we must reclaim schools from the industrial model of the twentieth century and build classrooms that respond to the broad and complex needs of the actual students who arrive at the schoolhouse door. Stories of the 2008 election punctuate his argument about the urgency of seizing this moment to disrupt the dominant framework defining public education reform. He calls on each of us to promote an alternative discourse as we simultaneously challenge and assist the Obama administration in envisioning and creating schools that more authentically reflect the ideals of a democracy.

Education in a democracy is geared toward and powered by a particularly precious and fragile ideal, which can be simply stated: every human being is of infinite and incalculable value; each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, moral, and creative force; each person is born free and equal in dignity and rights; each endowed with reason and conscience; each deserving, then, a community and a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition, and respect. This core value must express itself explicitly and implicitly in education as in every other aspect of associative living. The democratic injunction has big implications for curriculum and teaching as well--for what is taught and how. Democratic teaching, or teaching for social justice, encourages students to develop the capacity to name the world for themselves, to identify the obstacles to their full humanity, and to act courageously on whatever the known demands. This is not an add-on to "regular teaching" or some esoteric far-out practice, but rather the central everyday effort of teaching in a democracy. This kind of education is always about opening doors and opening minds as students forge their own pathways into a wider, shared world. The author urges educators, students, and citizens to press for an education worthy of a democracy and stresses that all children and youth in a democracy, regardless of economic circumstance, deserve full access to richly resourced classrooms led by caring, thoughtful, fully qualified, and generously compensated teachers.

In this article, the author discusses the military recruiting in high schools that has been a mainstay of the so-called all-volunteer armed forces from the start. High school kids are at an age when being a member of an identifiable group with a grand mission and a shared spirit--and never underestimate a distinctive uniform--is of exaggerated importance, which gang recruiters in big cities note with interest and exploit with skill. Here, he shows how recruiters enlist high school students and presents programs as means of military recruitment in high schools, junior highs and middle schools. One of the recruitment tools that has become a powerful recruiting device is Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC), the high school version of ROTC established by an act of Congress in 1916 "to develop citizenship and responsibility in young people."

In recent years, military recruitment has failed, with rare exceptions, to meet its quotas. The nations's high schools have thus become battlefields for the hearts and minds of young people as recruiters dangle gifts and promises of future benefits before teenagers in an effort to fill the ranks of an all-volunteer military. In this article, the author discusses the recruitment efforts among high school students. One of the most effective recruitment tools is Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC), the high school version of ROTC that was established by an act of Congress in 1916 "to develop citizenship and responsibility in young people." However, two years into the invasion of Iraq, recruiters are consistently failing to meet monthly enlistment quotas, despite deep penetration into high schools, sponsorship of NASCAR and other sporting events, and a $3-billion Pentagon recruitment budget. Increasingly, recruiters are offering higher bonuses and shortened tours of duty, and violations of ethical guidelines and the military's own putative standards are becoming commonplace--in one highly publicized case, a recruiter was heard on tape coaching a high school kid about how to fake a mandatory drug test. "One of the most common lies told by recruiters," writes Kathy Dobie, "is that it's easy to get out of the military if you change your mind. But once they arrive at training, the recruits are told there's no exit, period." Although recruiters are known to lie, the number of young people signing up is still plummeting. (Contains 20 endnotes.)

Would-be reformers need to beware of those who would co-opt the language of reform to undermine its ideals. Mr. Ayers and Mr. Klonsky examine how Chicago's Renaissance 2010 initiative has used the terms of the small schools movement to promote privatization and the erosion of public space. (Contains 5 endnotes.)

The old saying, that a single spark can start a prairie fire, appears in many forms and in different cultures carrying a range of shifting implications and meanings. In this article, William Ayers writes that in some instances, prairie fires are not always catastrophic. They are naturally occurring events necessary and renewing; removing the thick thatch that suffocates life, releasing the seeds while transforming and nudging the birds, fauna, insects, and other animals into a new life. Ayers considers that this saying provides an excellent metaphor to describe teaching because teachers strike sparks within students every day. In the classroom one single spark could be the catalyst that releases the flames of change. Ayers advocates the idea that it is at the crossroads of the intellectual and the ethical that teachers begin to find their bearings to enable them to navigate through both thinking and feeling in order to connect to students. He argues against teachers being increasingly deskilled and hammered into interchangeable cogs in a bureaucracy pressured to reduce teaching to a set of manageable controllable tasks and strip it of any moral purpose, intellectual engagement or creative action. Readers are encouraged to find ways to resist, and to rescue teaching from the gathering forces of mindlessness and carelessness. The article warns that teachers in democratic schools cannot be mechanical cogs in a bureaucratically driven machine or placeholders in an impersonal system, but rather must be highly trained and well-rewarded professionals afforded a large degree of flexibility and autonomy in order to attend to and support the growth of children.

The author offers a brief critique of the cliches that rain down on beginning teachers as they struggle to find their ways in this most complex, slippery, and rewarding work and encourages a steady focus on the intellectual and ethical heart of teaching from the start. A sample of practical advice--little parachutes and safety nets--are put forward as possible aids in the adventure.

Schools are always contested spaces, places where our assumptions about and hopes for humanity are worked out on the ground. Early childhood education is not immune from the struggles over what it means to be human and what the dimensions of a good society are or should be. This article offers an argument for early childhood to take up the challenge.

An urban community has forced the issue to get the school that it wants and that its children rightly deserve. The indispensable feature of successful schools in a functioning democracy include creating an authentic community capable of identifying obstacles and opportunities, setting standards and expectations, and deciding how best to provide students full access to a knowledgeable curriculum.

Teaching as an ethical enterprise is not presenting what is but moving toward what might be. Its fundamental message is that people can change their lives; teachers present possibilities and alternatives for doing so. (SK)

A volunteer teacher working with juvenile delinquents in the Cook County (Illinois) Temporary Juvenile Detention Center's notorious Audy Home sees these kids as mirrors of his own teenage boys, deserving of compassionate assistance. Labeling other people's children as feral or superpredators is misguided. So are federal and state legislatures'"modest proposals" to try youth as adults. Teachers must transmit messages of hope to at-risk youth. (MLH)