What many expected to be a standard lecture by Robert Parris Moses turned into a giant group discussion last week as the activist and educator encouraged audience members to contribute their views on education, civil rights, racial discrimination, privatization and critical-thinking skills.

The Jan. 29 public lecture, "Quality Education as a Civil Right," was Moses' first as the Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of '56 Professor. Cornell President David Skorton served as the moderator for the lecture-turned-workshop in the Statler Auditorium. Thirty-two people from an audience of 600 engaged in the discussion.

Moses is a Harvard-trained educator, a civil rights leader, a MacArthur Foundation fellow and founder of the Algebra Project, an innovative math literacy program originally developed for inner-city youth in Boston.

Moses suggested the necessity for a constitutional amendment to promote quality public school education. He then asked the audience for their own opinions. "We need public persons to participate in public discussions to steer our country in a specific direction," he said.

In the same vein, Moses reminded the audience that the Constitution does not say "We the President, We the Congress or We the Supreme Court." He urged the participants in the workshop to think of themselves as "We the people," and called for "a national conversation about how we should educate our young people."

The audience responded warmly to Moses' open dialogue format. Some questioned the exact meaning and purpose of a quality education; others suggested that today's public schools are more concerned with fulfilling test requirements than with real learning; or that capitalism is the fundamental cause of the discrepancy between public and private school education.

Throughout the discussion, quality education was framed as a civil right, an economic right, a democratic right and a basic human right. Many participants expressed concerns over the stifling of creativity in public school education -- an idea challenged by a public school teacher who argued that teaching critical-thinking skills is a priority among her colleagues.

One Cornell undergraduate, about to start teaching math in a middle school, said she was shocked when a student told her, "This doesn't matter. Even if I get my GRE, I'll still end up at the same place." This experience shaped her belief in a need to "fight for equality." A lack of quality education in public schools does not occur "randomly," the student added, but because "we have a system that disenfranchises certain groups and puts people into categories."

Another participant told the audience about her mother, who raised four children while working full time and studying toward a Ph.D. in psychology. "Blacks don't get their civil rights by sitting there," the speaker said. "We walk until our feet are bleeding. So stop talking, and start doing."

Zheng Yang is a writer intern with the Cornell Chronicle.