Where I grew up, learning was a collective activity. But when I got to school and tried to share learning with other students that was called cheating. The curriculum sent the clear message to me that learning was a highly individualistic, almost secretive, endeavor. My working class experience...was disparaged.

Today, there is a new focus on public values, the need for broad-based movements for solidarity, and alternative conceptions of politics, democracy and justice.

What many commentators have missed in the ongoing attack on Edward Snowden is not that he uncovered information that made clear how corrupt and intrusive the American government has become - how willing it is to engage in vast crimes against the American public.

People often say that Trump "speaks the truth," right? But I think what really is happening is he's become a symbol of the kind of cynicism the American public feels towards politicians. He embodies, and he's mobilizing, that cynicism. Because people have no faith in politics anymore. People actually believe that politics is dead, because it's bought and sold.

The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current.

The Left doesn't realize that unless you create a formative culture and a critical consciousness capable of changing the way people think about the common sense assumptions that drive their lives, then you've got an ideological foundation for totalitarianism that not only destroys the capacity to think critically, it destroys the capacity to have convictions at all.

The future doesn't have to mimic the worst parts of the present. There are new ways of sharing information, and as long as they don't give up on the importance of politics, the future is certainly open.