William Ayers

William "Bill" Ayers was born on December 26th, 1944. Today, he is an American professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ayers specialized in elementary education theory. He is widely known as a one-time leader of the American anti-war movement opposed to the War in Vietnam. His 1960s activism was quite radical and continues to inform his views on educational reform, curriculum, and teaching in general.

Ayers understands himself as in an ideological tradition that grows not only out of the anti-war left in the 1960s but of the "small-c" communist tradition. He argues that modern social institutions like government bureaucracy and capitalism produce rigid conformity and destroy individuality by stunting individual growth.

Ayers ardently rejects the classification of persons according to types, holding that generally speaking the ways that humans classify one another, say by race, class, IQ, etc., are mostly tools of separating "those who...