If Robert Moses’ dream of a Constitutional right to quality education for all is realized, he'll want to thank young people like those who led a community forum today at Washtenaw Community College.

Representatives of the Algebra Project — founded by Moses — and the Young People’s Project, a related organization, facilitated a discussion on educational transformation during the four-hour meeting of about 60 people.

Students ranging from middle-school age to the postgraduate level contributed thoughts on the subject.

Robert Moses developed the Algebra Project after receiving a MacArthur Fellowship in 1982.

Long a crusader for improved mathematical learning for America’s most disadvantaged youth, Moses was participating in the University of Michigan’s 2011 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium. On Friday evening, he addressed a group at the U-M’s Palmer Commons on the concept of Constitutionally protected educational rights.

He also signed his recent book, “Quality Education as a Constitutional Right: Creating a Grassroots Movement to Transform Public Schools.” Moses is a co-author of the work.

A member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, Moses said the burden of fulfilling his dream would fall to young people.

“This generation that’s running the meeting today is the generation that will have to decide whether or not they’re going to make this issue the major issue that they work on, because it will take all of their energy to pass a Constitutional amendment,” he said.

“Here you have an issue which will take a couple of decades to mature, but it is thinkable that if this generation takes it on, they could educate the generations that are coming up in the next couple of decades. So you actually could get a majority of people that figure out, ‘Yeah, we’ve got to raise this public education to the level of the Constitution.’”

One young person who expressed support for the effort is Marquan Jackson, a graduate student in the U-M School of Social Work.

Through his service as Algebra Project liaison to Ypsilanti High School, Jackson said he understands that educational transformation “allows for students’ social conditions to be recognized.”

Calling the program “really interesting,” he said he could foresee implementing similar principles and programs in his native Flint.

A “national conversation about education policy” is another of Moses’ objectives.

“We have a policy that’s unstated, and probably unstateable, which is that we run failing schools, and we rescue different categories of students with special programs,” he said.

The forum’s morning session reached the consensus that students’ voices should be heard more widely in a community-based education system.

Richarde Donelan, who teaches biology at WCC and is active in community development organizations, told the forum the current methods are based on an “archaic, 17th-century system of indoctrination.”

Beyond the traditional definition of success, experience is the key to education, Donelan said.

“The truth of that is found in the fact that the 17th-century system that was used by the Prussian army to indoctrinate its citizens was about experience,” he said.

“If we’re talking about making a change to education as we know it, then we’re talking about pulling back the curtain and allowing communities, their organizations and their citizens to literally be the launch pad for learning, for our young people understanding who they are, for gaining the tools to address the issues and concerns that mirror who they are.”