We all want to believe this American pastoral, but there's more to it. We have to be willing to exile ourselves from the fantasies and the mythology that we create around ourselves, or we're doomed to kind of innocently blunder into every country in the world and murder people.

Now you may like the images of long-haired hippies running in the streets throwing tear gas canisters, but we didn't end the war. And that's what we set out to do. What was not ended by the anti-war movement was ended by the Vietnamese. That's our shame.

In some ways a mark of good parenting is that you don't try to make your children into little knockoffs of yourself. None of us went into business. None of us became powerful people like that. All of us pursued our own passions and our own interests. One of my brothers was filmmaker. One of my brothers was a teacher. My sister was a librarian.

Something about the fact that an African American had, given the long sad history of our country, now become President - that was exhilarating.

Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.

Agitators, organizers, activists, intellectuals aren't bound by those rules. We're not trying to figure out, how do I thread this particular needle?

It's the connection between schools and communities that creates greatness in schools.