A Quote by Bill Ayers

The fact is that in my prep school, I went to a boarding school, 39 young men graduated from that prep school. Five years later, a quarter of us were in SDS, in Students for Democratic Society. Not because we were particularly chosen or because we were as I say, we were lucky but we were mainly luckily to grow up at a time where this black freedom movement was really defining the moral character of what it meant to be a citizen and a person.
Finally, one night we were smoking pot [with Michael O'Donoghue] and talking about the people that are invariably in high school, whether you go to prep school or public school or ghetto school or rich suburban school. And actually, it spun off from a Kurt Vonnegut quote.
I was from my little perch in a prep school I saw the civil rights movement and it was defining the moral dimensions of the time and I was drawn to it and I read James Baldwin and read Invisible Man and these were my touch points. But it was when I got to Michigan and saw a bigger world, a real world, that I got involved.
Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.
I don't know if one's more typecasting than the other, or what I am more like. But I know that the high school I went to was a private school. It was prep school. It was a boarding school. So we didn't have a shop class. We didn't have Saturday detention. We went to school on Saturday. We did have Sunday study, which you very rarely get, because then you have 13 straight days of school. Who wants that?
Do you have to be like a second-grade dropout to be an umpire? Did you go to school until you were 8 years old? I think you quit school before you were 10. Stay in school kids or you'll end up being an umpire.
I had gone to a Catholic prep school where everyone was rich and having kids by the time they were 30.
There was a Yale even before Larry [Kramer] and I got there, and there were three designations of students: "white shoe," "brown shoe," and "black shoe." "White shoe" people were kind of the ur-preppies from high-class backgrounds. "Brown shoe" people were kind of the high school student-council presidents who were snatched up and brushed up a little bit to be sent out into the world. "Black shoe" people were beyond the pale. They were chemistry majors and things like that.
I hated school . . . I freaking hated it. The fact is that it revolved around something you didn't have access to. If you weren't on the football team, if you were in the band, you were a leper. When people say those were the best years of our lives, I want to scream.
Our parents were very strict. Not in a brutal or awful way, but there were definite rules, such as after six on a school night you didn't go out, and at weekends you had to be home by a certain time. It wasn't particularly sheltered, but we were well brought-up.
My well-meaning parents decided to send me to a Catholic grade school to get a better education than I probably would have received at the local public school. They had no way of knowing that the school nuns, who were the majority of the teachers at this particular parochial school, were right-wing, card-carrying John Birch Society members.
Shortridge High School was an elitist high school. In a way it was a scandal because you could go there no matter where you lived, if you could get there. It was for over-achievers. It was for people who were going to college. So we were very special and we were hated for being ritzy.
I was in a university prep school in Canada, and the way that particular place worked was, you chose at a very young age what you were going to do with the rest of your life. Mine was law.
People who were also traders were also men of Sufism, as we see around Java, people who were outwardly trading but were also men of very high spiritual character. Otherwise no trader would be able to convert a person from one religion to another. It was because they were men of spiritual character.
Most of the people that I went to school with - I went to secondary school - we were educated to go and work in the line at Ford's, and if we were lucky, technical skilled labor. I sort of rejected that, and thought I wanted to do something else.
The Organization of Afro-American Unity was an organization that was a secular group. It largely consisted of people that we would later call several years later Black Powerites, Black nationalists, progressives coming out of the Black freedom struggle, the northern students' movement, people - students, young people, professionals, workers, who were dedicated to Black activism and militancy, but outside of the context of Islam.
Me and my friends in high school were the only girls who went to hardcore shows. It was three of us, and the rest of the audience was male. We didn't really think about it. We weren't thinking we were alienated or whatever, but eventually, as there started to be violence in the scene we were in during high school, we started to be turned off by the violence.
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