Education policymakers are on the wrong track, author and former civil rights leader Bob Moses told an audience yesterday at the Graduate School of Education's Askwith Forum.

Instead of focusing resources on getting select students into the best schools, the country needs to create a floor below which no students-even those in the inner cities-fall, Moses said.

Moses recently published a book called "Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights." He currently heads the Algebra Project, a program designed to teach math to inner-city and rural children in an effort to prepare them for the new world of technology.

"Computers have brought about a new literacy," Moses said. "What do people say when an adult can't read? We call him illiterate. What do we call adults who can't do math? Simply adults who can't do math. In 50 years, they will be called illiterate."

Moses spoke of his previous work in the civil rights movement and his work with children as both being "demand-side driven." He said civil rights became an issue in the U.S. only once minorities demanded the country's recognition. And the problems of students' learning will not be addressed until they demand to be taught, he said.

The goal of Moses' Algebra Project is to excite students to fight for their own education.

"The argument that kids won't learn dissolves as soon as demand is seen, just as the argument that blacks were apathetic disappeared once people saw hundreds of them outside voting centers," Moses said.

Moses' speech began with a quote from his book, but he was not the one to read it. A group of children from the King Open School in Cambridge attended the lecture, and the 12 students were surprised when Moses addressed them directly, and even more unnerved when Moses asked for a volunteer from the group to come to the front and read.

Throughout the lecture, he slowed his delivery when addressing the children and gave definitions for the more difficult words he used.

"There is no point in having this conversation without including the ones who are going to be affected by it," Moses said.