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Quote by Bill Ayers

“What was on the agenda was school and social life and those kinds of things. So I was the middle of five kids. So I had the great advantage of being able to play up to the older kids and play down to the younger kids and I think that's part of what propelled me to become a teacher at some point in my life. But it was a comfortable childhood. It was a privileged childhood.”

Quote by Bill Ayers

Author

Bill Ayers
Bill Ayers

Bill Ayers (born December 26, 1944) is an American educator and former professor who taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He earned his doctorate in education from the University of Michigan and specialized in curriculum theory, teacher education, and educational reform. Ayers is a controversial figure due to his past involvement with the Weather Underground, a radical left-wing organization in the 1960s and 1970s. He has authored several books on progressive education and teaching methods. His academic work has influenced educators in the progressive education movement, though his historical association with radical groups remains a subject of public debate. more

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“Living in a bubble as I said in a featherbed of privilege. That's why leaving home, leaving the prep school and going to the University of Michigan in the early '60s was a moment of awakening and to go to a place like Michigan and to see suddenly a world in flames and the injustices all around was quite a wake up call. I lasted a year and a half at Michigan before I dropped out and joined the merchant marines and I was a merchant marine for my sophomore year then I came back to Michigan.”

“I was from my little perch in a prep school I saw the civil rights movement and it was defining the moral dimensions of the time and I was drawn to it and I read James Baldwin and read Invisible Man and these were my touch points. But it was when I got to Michigan and saw a bigger world, a real world, that I got involved.”

“The fact is that in my prep school, I went to a boarding school, 39 young men graduated from that prep school. Five years later, a quarter of us were in SDS, in Students for Democratic Society. Not because we were particularly chosen or because we were as I say, we were lucky but we were mainly luckily to grow up at a time where this black freedom movement was really defining the moral character of what it meant to be a citizen and a person.”