Chomsky. Transcript. On Education.

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1.     When I graduate, I'm gonna be a History teacher. - History teacher. - What do you suggest I do in that context?

2.     Well, you know, that's really important. A lot of people, if you think of your own experience, I know me. You can remember cases when a teacher made a terrific impression on you. Most schooling is training for conformity and stupidity. But very once in a while, That's institutional, too, there are reasons for that. But, occasionally, you get a spark. Somebody will challenge your mind, make you think, encourage you to think, and so on. There is tremendous effect, you just reach all sorts of people. And of course, you have to tread a narrow line. There are plenty of people who don't want students to think. They are afraid of the crisis in democracy. People start thinking, you get all these problems I've been quoting at the beginning. They won't have humility enough to submit to civil rule. They'll start to try to press their demands at political arena. They have ideas of their own instead of believing what they're told. And previlege and power typically doesn't want that. So they can react. And high school teachers who tries to get students to think may find opression and firing, and so on.

3.     You said a lot about the role of the media in our so-called democracy, and I'm wondering how you see the role of our education system, what it's doing right now, what forces are driving, what constraints there are, how should it operate.

4.     I quoted the tri-lateral commission's view of the educational system, namely it's the System of the Indoctrination of the Young. And I think that's correct. It's the System of the Indoctrination of the Young. That was how the liberal élites regarded, and they are more or less accurate. So, educational system is supposed to train people to be obedient, conformist, not think too much, do what you're told, stay passive, don't cause any crisis in democracy, don't raise any questions, and so on. That's basically what the, what the system is about. Even if the fact that the system has a lot of stupidity in it, I think it has a function. It means that people are filtered out for obedience. If you guarantee lots of stupidity in the educational system. Stupid assignment and things like that. You know that, only the people who make it through are people like me, and like most of you, I guess, who are willing to do it no matter how stupid it is because you want to go to the next step. So you may know this assignment is idiotic, guy up there couldn't think his way out of a paperback. But you'll do it anyway because that's the way you get to the next class. You wanna make it and so on and so forth. There are people who don't that, you know. There are people who say "I'm not gonna do this. This is ridiculous.", you know. Those people are called behavioural problems or something like that. They end up in a principal's office, on the streets selling drugs, whatever. All of these are technique for (selection for obedience). I don't know how to prove this, but I have a feeling, when you go to élite universities, you find more obedience and conformity. Probably because you're getting students who are better able to do it. All of that is functional. That's the way it works. And it works right through graduate school. I mean, if you… There are excep... I mean, by the time you get to graduate school, it's a little more vary because real contradiction develop in the system. Problem is you can't have progress this way. Especially, Science and Engineering. It's a problem because corporations need Science and Engineering. If you don't have innovation, you're really in trouble. So they have to encourage creativity and independence because you can't get anywhere if you just copy what someone told you. You have to be challenging things all the time. Challenging everything, you know. Thinking new thoughts, and so on. There you got a real contradiction. It's hard to train people to be creative, challenging, so on, and ensure, somewhere in their lives, they are conformist, obedient, and never think. So you have problems. That's a serious problem in Japan, incidentally. We think Japan is this tremendous superpower but that's very misleading. Japan, for example, is very poor in Science, for example. And they are aware of it. Part of the reason is. It's part of the same thing that makes them good workers. Obedient workers. (accurate) It's very obedient society. Very deferential and conformist society. And one effect of that is there are real constraints against independent, and free thinking. You see it in the science very clearly. The... But it's a problem here, too. They show up much less in Ideological subjects. Because it doesn't matter so much if people have. There is... Profits aren't made by Historians having original ideas about French Revolution. So they can have conventional ideas. That means pressure to try to support innovation and freedom is much less and pressure for conformity is, on the other hand, is much greater because Ideological subjects begin to be dangerous if people begin to their own thoughts. Not so dangerous if they have original ideas about Physics. Nevertheless, you begin to have a little flux in the system by the time you get to graduate school. Even at lower level, you find it. There are teachers who do stimulate thought. And sometimes they get away with it. And, all the way through, you know, if people are learning things, you can't just make them regurgitate what they heard.

5.     Now there are a lot of pressure to turn school into marine corps and there is a lot of support for it. For example, there is this best-seller, last couple of years by Allan Bloom. It was all over the supermarkets. Closing of the American Mind. Huge best-seller, supermarker racks which is where I read it, things like that. If you take a look at what he's saying, and there are, huge accolades, and so on. He was saying that a couple of smart guys will decide what the great thoughts are and every student will memorise them. That's education, okay? That's the way to turn people into pure automaton. Even if they happen to pick the great thoughts, there is no way less likely to get anybody to think about those thoughts than make them to curriculum. That finishes them off. And I think that's the purpose, really. The purpose is to impose authority, you know. Here are the great thoughts, all the other stuffs are rubbish, just learn these and you're okay. I'll pick them. You'll memorise them. That's basically the line. Now, of course, that's the opposite of education. That's the way you study Tom Odor (?) or something like that. But it's very popular. I think it reflects the same concern over the crisis in Democracy. In fact, Allan Bloom, himself was extremely, incident that really got to him was the case in Cornell where he was a professor. Where some black students took over one of admini.. one of the buildings. He said that, That's just like Nazis. Back to the Nazis. All the business about the Nazis, and so on and so forth. If you take a look at what happened. That isn't what he thought. Faculty capitulated. Just like Heidegger capitulated to Nazis and so on. What actually happened if you look back. There were real agreements. Undoubtedly, they shouldn't have done what they did, going there with guns, and so on. But it was settled very amicably. It was settled amicably. Nobody was killed. The agreements were // dealt with. Net result was better than it was before. He didn't tell you what he thought they should have done. But it's sort of implicit, I mean. They should have bombed the place or something like that. That's what really set them off. Generally, what set many people off was the. 60s are now described in the Literature as if it were times students running around, destroying the foundation of civilisation., and so on. What was actually going on was they were asking questions. They were raising questions. They were looking into things that haven't been looked into before. There were not just obedient. Point of view from a lot of faculties, that's equivalent of burning the buildings. That small distinction, they can't make that. And there's pressure to turn back to school when you didn't have to worry about things. Disobedient students asking questions about thing you didn't tell them to think about, and so on.