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

I wish I had been wiser. I wish I had been more effective, I wish I'd been more unifying, I wish I'd been more principled.

If you read the literature of Soviet Communism, you see a dogma that's chilling. On the other hand, if you read the literature of anti-communism, it's every bit as dogmatic.

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.

Organizing the working class in England or the U.S. or any other advanced capitalist country has been a daunting challenge.

[Lyndon ] Johnson was responding to a black freedom movement that was tearing the country open and he did what he had to do as a conservative politician.

It transmitted because on the campuses, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was recruiting, was organizing. Students for a Democratic Society was founded at Michigan just a couple years before I got there. So, there was a kind of a churning of political awareness. It was just beginning.