Demand the Impossible - Bill Ayers - Part 4 of 4

2020 Reading Challenge - Day 187

July 6, 2020

Book 53 - Demand the Impossible: A Radical Manifesto
Bill Ayers (2016)
 Part 4 - page 146-200
Reading Time - 60 minutes

In this section, we examine Education, the Environment and the Conclusion. Right off the bat... I have to say I was appointed with the chapter on the Environment, it was the shortest chapter of the book and barely skimmed the surface. There was, for example, nothing on the Food Industry which, I think, could have been a whole separate chapter. It would demonstrate quite nicely the commercialisation of nutrition...

Let's start with some stats from education:

• Public Schools in the District of Columbia get $11,965/pupil
• A Private School in DC gets $37,750/pupil
• Student to Teacher ratio at public schools in DC - 13.32:1
• Student to Teacher ratio at private school in DC - 7.8:1

This chapter actually has a stronger "What if..." slant than some of the previous chapters. Ayers refers to Freedom Schools which engage students with their real life experiences and teach them to think for themselves by interrogating and engaging with the world. Compare that with the average urban public school where the goal is obedience, standardisation and conformity - i.e. control. Even in private schools, students who are smart, talented and driven end up anxious, timid and lost - unable to think for themselves. Education has been commodified and commercialised and likely needs to be completely rethought. My understanding is that the current education system was designed to train workers for corporations, for their factories. In which case, conformity and control would make sense. But the world has changed... is changing... will change. So perhaps education needs to be rethunk. This quote stuck with me:

Free people, including free teachers and free students, refuse obedience and conformity in favor of liberating dispositions of mind: initiative, questioning, courage, audacity, imagination, creativity, inventiveness, and empathy. These qualities cannot be delivered in top-down ways, but must be modeled and nourished, encouraged and defended, and mostly practiced again and again and again.

We then move on to the Envrionment and Ayers admits that there is evidence of cataclysmic climate change all around us - so easy to see and yet it is denied "in favour of magical thinking". Somehow technology will save us... or maybe, to quote a current politician - climate change will just "disappear". Ayers gets right into the heart of it by saying that climate change is denied because the solution would be to overthrow capitalism. Which makes sense. Capitalism is based on expansion - always searching for more, selling more, producing more, extracting more... we need to slow down. The Earth is finite... and there is no "more"...

Sooo... where does that leave us? Well... the American Dream, according to Ayers is "a deadly illusion". The US thinks it is an indispensable nation, that it has the good guys... which is purely naked narcissism. Ayers refers to a little snippet from the TV show, Newsroom... I had seen this before but lost the link... glad to have it again!

Martin Luther King got quite clear that just reforming society wasn't going to work, it needed a complete rebuild, if we were to combat racism, poverty and war.

Ayers has a few tips:

• I can't do everything. True. But, can I do anything? Anything at all, no matter how small? Yes. We can always do something.
  
• The Fire from Below is what will generate change - people agitating and organising and putting pressure on the politicians and corporations.
• Breaking free from the TINA trap - There is No Alternative. The world we live in is not necessarily the best of all possible worlds. What else could it be? Ayers suggests a world of socialism with participatory democracy and freedom.

Capitalism has no answers for us, nor for the crises we face. In many ways, it reminds me of a booster rocket that has pushed us high and far but... it is on its last gasp of fuel... and unless we eject it... the weight of it will drag us down.

Ayers suggests that we choose life, choose possibility, choose rebellion and choose revolution. And lest we think revolution means guns and war... gardening is a revolutionary act. Other countries do things differently... look at Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany... they all have something to teach about living life differently. Which reminds me of Michael's Moore's film, Where to Invade Next...

 but that would be a whole other blog...