Former militant activist and college professor Bill Ayers spoke to a full room at Highline Community College for Martin Luther King Week.

He talked to a packed room about education reform, ignoring his activist past during the 60's and 70's as a leader in the anti-Vietnam War group the Weathermen. While in the Weathermen Ayers participated in bombing the United States Capital in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972.

Ayers is a retired University of Illinois at Chicago, where he taught, among other things, urban education reform.

Education reform was the topic for Ayers talk at Highline Community College. Ayers said he sees teachers and students as being pilgrims on a voyage, learning together. There is a current framework that says the teachers are knowledgeable and the students are ignorant Ayers said, and he doesn't agree with that.

"We get stuck in this idea that there is a fixedness to learning," Ayers said. "This notion of a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old and a 12-year-old who are all the same is a myth."

He said children have three teachers. Their first teacher is their parents, their second teacher is their grade school teacher and their third teacher is their environment.

"We have an educational policy that is simple," Ayers said. "Choose the right parents...Well, that's wrong. In a democracy, that is fundamentally, profoundly backward."

He talked about the inequality of the money spent on each student depending on if they were in a rich neighborhood or a poor one, the student in the rich neighborhood having more money spent on them and thus getting a better education.

In a Democracy, Ayers said, this policy is not acceptable.

"In a democracy we base education on the fundamental principal of the incalculable value of each person," Ayers said.

He said education is under attack as it is being framed as a product.

If we cannot imagine anything different than the injustices we see today, Ayers said, we are doomed to repeat them.

He asked people to open their eyes and imagine and work for something better than the world we have now.

"Standing right next to the world we are living in is a world that could be, but isn't yet. And that is our responsibility.

"We are all blind people who can see; we are all seeing people who are blind," he said. "So when I say open your eyes, I don't mean once or for a minute. I mean continually. There's always more to know, more to see. And as soon as you are satisfied that you can see everything, then you are dead as a seeing person."

The room where Ayers was giving his talk filled up before he even took the podium. A video feed was set up and was displayed in another room so more people could listen to him talk.