Teaching Toward Freedom

For William Ayers, noted educator and activist, "the allure of teaching, that ineffable magic drawing me back to the classroom again and again, issues from an ideal that lies directly at its heart: Teaching, at its best, is an enterprise that helps human beings reach the full measure of their humanity."

In Teaching Toward Freedom, Ayers illuminates the hope as well as the conflict that characterize the entire project of education: how it can be used in authoritarian and dehumanizing ways in the service of the state, the church, or a restrictive existing social order-an idea he abhors-or, as he envisions it, as an undertaking to help students become more fully human, more engaged, more participatory, more free. Drawing on his own classroom experiences and those of his many colleagues, as well as on popular culture, film, poetry, and novels, Ayers redraws the lines concerning how we teach and why, and the surprising things we uncover when we allow students to become visible, vocal authors of their own texts and creators of their own lives.

"Committed and aware teachers," Ayers argues, "must endeavor to accomplish two crucial tasks. One is to convince students . . . that there is no such thing as receiving an education as a passive receptor or an inert vessel-in that direction lies nothing but subservience, indoctrination, and worse. All real education is and must always be self-education. The second task is to demonstrate to students . . . that they are valued, that their humanity is honored, and that their growth, enlightenment, and liberation are the paramount concern. We take the side of the student. . . ." This lucid and inspiring book will help teachers at every level to realize that ideal.

Ayers (education, U. of Illinois at Chicago), who has taught for 30 years, feels that teachers are "moral actors," that teaching involves "moral commitment and ethical action," and that these elements are at the core of real education. He advises teachers to accept their calls as instigators of freedom and enlightenment, and act as coworkers with students. Using examples from the academe, including poetry, history, and fiction, as well as popular culture, he examines what can go right, and wrong, and how teachers can be liberators or tyrants, depending on how they perceive their core missions and on how well they understand their students as individuals. Ayers includes neither a bibliography nor an index. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Library Journal

"What am I teaching for? And what am I teaching against?" These are the fundamental questions that Ayers (education, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago) explores in this collection of essays on the moral dimension of teaching, originally delivered as a series of lectures during the author's fall 2003 stint as a visiting scholar at Lesley University. Throughout, Ayers returns to his commitment to education as activism and to the importance of teachers standing "on the side of the student." Drawing, as in earlier works, on his experience in the Civil Rights Movement and the antiwar movement of the 1960s, Ayers deftly melds his own experiences as a teacher with those of like-minded colleagues, as well as with evocative lessons about education and humanity drawn from the work of authors including Pablo Neruda, Malcolm X, and Myles Horton. Likely to be as popular as the author's earlier To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, this collection is recommended for any academic library. Scott Walter, Univ. of Kansas Libs., Lawrence Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

William Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the founder of the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society, and he is the author of many books on education, including Teaching the Personal and Political, On the Side of the Child, To Teach, A Simple Justice, and A Kind and Just Parent.