Teaching with Conscience in an Imperfect World: An Invitation

This book is an invitation to become one of those passionate and transformative teachers, someone who can join with others to rescue teaching from the heavy hand of the test-obsessed technocrats, and change the world―or, at the very least, change the people who will change the world.

How do we see our schools and the project of education? Is this the best we can do? What would we like our schools to become? How might we get there? In this provocative book, Bill Ayers invites us to dream of schools in which each child “is of infinite and incalculable value.” Blending personal anecdotes with critique of the state of education, this beautifully written little book is filled with big ideas that explore the challenges and opportunities for an education system that desperately needs repair.

Teaching with Conscience in an Imperfect World is an urgent call to action and a plan to help educators stretch toward something new and dramatically better―schools that are more joyful and more just, more balanced and more guided by the power of love.

Book Features:

• Promotes meaningful discussions in teacher education courses.
• Addresses problems with our current education system and how they came to be.
• Advocates, with illustrations, for schooling that promotes critical thinking and engaged learning.
• Critiques school reform efforts, such as high-stakes testing, curriculum standardization, and dated performance metrics.
• Urges teachers to see students as full and equal human beings with agency and capacity.
• Offers 21 “gestures” toward the kind of schools all children and youth deserve.

William Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (retired), education activist, and bestselling author of Teaching the Taboo: Courage and Imagination in the Classroom (with Rick Ayers), To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, Third Edition, and To Teach: The Journey, in Comics (with Ryan Alexander-Tanner).