by Noam Chomsky
I should say that I learned about this not from books but from experience. I was in a Deweyite experimental school. That was the way things worked. It seemed very natural. I only read about it later.
The battle over education has been going on for quite some time now. The 1960s were a major period of agitation, activism, exploration, and they had a major civilizing effect on the society: civil rights, women’s rights, a whole range of things. But for elites, it was a dangerous time because it had too much of a civilizing effect on the society. People were questioning authority, wanting to know answers, not just accepting everything that was handed down. There was an “excess of democracy.”8
Looking for answers—that’s frightening. There was an immediate backlash in the 1970s, and we’re still living with the results. All of this is well documented. Two of the striking documents, which I think are very much worth reading, from opposite ends of the spectrum, are, on the Right, the Powell memorandum and, on what’s called the Left, the Trilateral Commission report.
Lewis Powell was a corporate lobbyist for the tobacco industry who was very close to Nixon, who later appointed him to the Supreme Court. In 1971, he wrote a memorandum to the Chamber of Commerce, the main business lobby.9 It was supposed to be secret but it leaked. It’s quite interesting reading, not only for the content but also because of the style, which is pretty typical of business literature and of totalitarian culture in general. It reads a little like NSC-68.10 The whole society is crumbling, everything is being lost. The universities are being taken over by followers of Herbert Marcuse. The media and the government have been taken over by the Left. Ralph Nader is destroying the private economy, and so on. Businessmen are the most persecuted element in the society, but we don’t have to accept it, Powell said. We don’t have to let these crazy people destroy everything. We have the wealth. We’re the trustees of the universities. We’re the people who own the media. We don’t have to let all this happen. We can get together and use our power to force things in the direction that we want—of course he used nice terms such as democracy and freedom.
It is such a grotesque caricature, you have to wonder what lunacy could allow people to think like this. But it’s normal. Like a three-year-old who doesn’t get his way, if you think you ought to own everything and you’ve lost anything, everything is gone. That’s very much the attitude of those who are accustomed to power and believe they have a right to power.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have the Trilateral Commission report, The Crisis of Democracy, written by liberal internationalists, Carter administration liberals, basically. They were concerned about what they called the failure of the “institutions which have played the major role in the indoctrination of the young.”11 The young are not being properly indoctrinated by the schools, the churches. We can see that from the pressures for too much democracy. And we have to do something about it. It’s not very different from Powell’s memorandum. It’s a little more nuanced, but it’s essentially the same idea.
Too much freedom, too much democracy, not enough indoctrination—how do you deal with that? In the educational system, you move toward more control, more indoctrination, cutting back on the dangerous experiments with freedom and independence. That’s what we’ve seen. These shifts correspond to the period when corporatization of the universities began to take place, with a sharp rise in managerial structures and a “bottom line” approach to education, and also when tuitions start to rise. The tuition problem has become so huge that it’s on the front pages now. Student debt is on the scale of credit-card debt and by now it probably exceeds it.12 Students are burdened by huge debts. The laws have been changed so there’s no way out—no bankruptcy, no escape.13 So you’re trapped for life. That’s quite a technique of indoctrination and control.
There’s no economic basis for rising tuition costs. In the 1950s, our society was much poorer, but education was essentially free. The GI bill, was, of course, selective—it was for whites, not blacks, mostly men, not women—but it did offer free education to a huge part of the population that never would have gotten to college otherwise.14 More broadly, tuition was very low by current standards. It was a great help to the economy, incidentally. The 1950s and the 1960s were the decades of the greatest economic growth in history, and the newly educated population was a significant part of that story.
Now we’re a much richer society than we were in the 1950s. Productivity has increased a lot. There’s way more wealth. So it’s ludicrous to think that education can’t be funded. The same conclusion can be drawn by looking at other countries. Take, say, Mexico. It’s a poor country. It has quite a decent higher education system. The quality is high. Teacher salaries are low by our standards, but the system is quite respectable. And it’s free. Actually, the government did try some years ago to add a small tuition, but there was a national student strike and the government backed down.15 So education in this poor country is still free. The same is true in rich countries such as Germany and Finland, which has the best education system in the world by many measures.16 Education in these countries is free—or virtually free. If you look at the percentage of our gross domestic product that would be required to provide free higher education, it’s very slight. So it’s very hard to argue that there are any fundamental economic reasons for rising tuition costs. But it does have the effect of control and indoctrination.
Look at K-to-12 education, kindergarten through high school. Policies like No Child Left Behind under Bush and Race to the Top under Obama, despite what they may claim, basically require schools to teach to the test. They control teachers and make sure that they don’t move in independent directions, a step toward imposing a business model, as in the colleges. Anyone who has any experience with the K-to-12 system knows how this works. Students are required to conform, to memorize to pass the next test. And there are punitive measures to keep teachers in line. If the students don’t get a high-enough grade on the test—which could mean they’re too creative and independent—then the teacher is in trouble. So they are forced to conform to this system.
Meanwhile, the basic problems with the educational system are never addressed. It’s just way underfunded. Class sizes are too large. Diane Ravitch, formerly a conservative education critic who is now very critical of the current system and very knowledgeable, recently did some comparative work on the Finnish educational system, which gets all the best records in the world. She showed that one of the major differences is that teachers are respected in Finland.17 Teaching is considered a respected profession. Good people go into the field. They put energy and initiative into their work. They’re given a good deal of freedom to experiment, explore, let students search on their own.
In Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Bruce Alberts, a biochemist, had a series of editorials on science education.18 What he points out is quite interesting. He says science education is increasingly being designed with the effect of killing any interest in science. If you are in college, maybe you have to memorize a bunch of enzymes or something. If you are in elementary school, you memorize the periodic table. When you study the discovery of DNA, you’re just taught what scientists already discovered. You memorize the fact that DNA is a double helix. Science is being taught in a way that kills any joy in science, gives you no sense of what discovery is. It’s the opposite of Weisskopf’s view that it matters what you discover, not what you cover.
Alberts gives some nice examples of alternatives that do work. In one kindergarten class, each kid was given a dish with a mixture of pebbles, shells, and seeds, and asked, “How do we know if something is a seed?”19 So the class began with what they called a “scientific conference.” The kids got together and discussed the various ways in which you might be able to figure out what a seed is. The kids were guided by the teacher, so if things went off in some wrong direction, the teacher could step in. But it’s essentially laying down the string. Here’s your task. Figure it out. O
ver time, they did figure it out. They ran some experiments, tried out new ideas, interacted. At the end of this particular program each kid was given a magnifying glass. They cut open the seeds and discovered what the embryo is that gives the seed its energy and differentiates it from a pebble. Those kids learned something. Not only did they learn something about seeds, which doesn’t matter that much, they learned what it is to discover something, why it’s fun and exciting, why you should try it somewhere else, why you should be puzzled and inquire.
That can be done at any level of education. A friend of mine who teaches sixth grade described to me once how she had taught her students about the American Revolution. A couple of weeks before they got to that assignment, she started acting very harshly, issuing orders and commands, making the kids to do all kinds of things they didn’t want to do. They got pretty upset, and they wanted to do something about it. They started to get together and protest. By the time it got to the right point, she opened the lesson on the American Revolution. She said, “Okay, now you can see why people rebel.” And they understood why you would. That’s the type of creative teaching that doesn’t pass some standardized test necessarily, but it allows children to learn. That can be done at any level, from kindergarten to graduate school, in any subject—history, science, whatever it may be.
So those are the two concepts. And it’s pretty clear which way the educational system is being pressed—and I think there’s a reason why. We’ve got to educate people to keep them from our throats, as Emerson put it a long time ago. At the K-to-12 level, there is now an effort to destroy the public educational system. That’s essentially what charter schools are about. They don’t have any better outcomes. They feed at the public trough, the public pays for them, but they’re essentially out of the public system and under much more private control, essentially privatized. It’s destroying the ethic of the public education system. The ethic of that system is solidarity. You have a public education system because you’re supposed to care whether children you don’t know and have nothing to do with have the opportunity to go to school. That’s social solidarity, but that’s very dangerous—the opposite of atomization.
My feeling is that Social Security is under attack for the same reasons. There’s no economic reason. It’s in very good shape. With a little tinkering, it could go on indefinitely.20 But it’s always listed as one of the big problems. We’ve got to do something about Social Security. I think the issue is the same: it’s a system based on the concept that you should care about others, that you should care whether elderly people you don’t know can live decent lives. You can’t have that sort of thing. If a widow somewhere doesn’t have food, it’s her problem. She married the wrong husband or didn’t invest properly. In a society in which everyone is out just for themselves, you don’t pay attention to anyone else.
Ron Paul was asked at a Republican presidential debate what if “something terrible happens” to some guy who has no health insurance? What do you do? He said, “That’s what freedom is all about: taking your own risks.”21 Actually, when the moderator pushed back on this, he backed off and he said that people without health insurance would be taken care of by their families or their church. Then Rand Paul—this is more interesting—said national health insurance is slavery.22 He said, I’m a physician, and if there’s national health insurance, the government is forcing me to take care of somebody who is ill. Why should I be a slave to the state? Here we’re getting capitalist pathology in its most extreme, lunatic form. It is the opposite of solidarity, mutual support, mutual help.
Is it a form of social Darwinism?
I wouldn’t even call it social Darwinism. That’s too sophisticated. It’s just, I’m out for myself, nobody else—and that’s the way it ought to be. There was a recent study done at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics on attitudes of young people from ages eighteen to twenty-nine.23 It was pretty striking. There’s a lot of commitment to what in the United States are called libertarian ideas. Libertarian in the United States is pretty close to totalitarian. If you really think through what are called libertarian concepts, they basically say that we’re going to hand over decision making to concentrations of private power and then everybody will be free. I’m not saying the people who advocate it intend that, but if you think it through, that’s the consequence, plus the breaking down of social bonds. A lot of young people are attracted to that. For example, less than half of the people in the Harvard survey felt that the government should provide health insurance or “basic necessities, such as food and shelter” to those in need who cannot afford them.24
When people talk about the government in the United States, they’re talking about some alien force. Hatred of democracy is so deeply embedded in the doctrinal system that you don’t think of the government as your instrument. It’s some alien instrument. It’s taken a lot of work to make people hate democracy that much. In a democratic society, to the extent that it’s a democratic society, the government is you. It’s your decisions. But the government here is depicted as something that’s attacking us, not our instrument to do what we decide.
Actually, one of the most frightening statistics for the Harvard survey has to do with the environment. Only 28 percent think that the “government should do more to curb climate change, even at the expense of economic growth.”25 If that continues, that’s a death sentence for the species. But it’s the anticipated result of the major attack on social solidarity, on participation, on interaction, and on the fundamentals of democracy.
April 15, the day when you pay your taxes, gives you a good index of how democracy is functioning. If democracy were functioning effectively, April 15 would be a day of celebration. That’s a day on which we get together to contribute to implementing the policies that we’ve decided on. That’s what April 15 ought to be. Here it’s a day of mourning. This alien force is coming to steal your hard-earned money from you. That indicates an extreme contempt for democracy. And it’s natural that a business-run society and doctrinal system should try to inculcate that belief.
8
Aristocrats and Democrats
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS (MAY 15, 2012)
There was a big sex scandal around the Cartagena Summit of the Americas in Colombia in spring 2012, but in a column for the New York Times Syndicate you pinpointed some more substantive developments.1
It was actually a very interesting and significant conference. The participants didn’t come out with a formal declaration because they couldn’t reach agreement. The reason they couldn’t reach agreement was that, on the two major issues, the United States and Canada rejected what the rest of the hemi sphere insisted on, which was inclusion of Cuba and serious consideration of the decriminalization of drug policy.2 That’s very significant, another step in the isolation of the United States and Canada—and in the integration of the Latin American and Caribbean countries, which is very important.
About a year ago, a new organization formed called CELAC, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States.3 CELAC includes all the countries in the hemi sphere minus the United States and Canada. There is some belief that it might actually replace the traditionally U.S.-dominated Organization of American States. There are already steps in that direction, with UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations, which has functioned with some success in a number of cases.
Latin America also has shown increasing independence in international affairs. Brazil, for example, has taken on a very interesting role in the international system, which the United States doesn’t like.
If there is another hemispheric summit and Cuba is admitted, the United States will presumably stay home. Or if the United States blocks Cuba’s participation again, there just won’t be a summit. Washington is also isolated on its position on drugs. More and more countries in the hemi sphere are moving to change drug policy. Even conservative presidents are calling for decriminalization. Not legalization, but shifting possession of drugs from a criminal offense
to an administrative matter, like a parking ticket. These policies have been pretty successful in Europe. That’s essentially what most of Latin America is moving toward, beginning with marijuana, maybe moving on to other drugs. Again, the United States just refuses flat out.
It’s quite significant, because the people of Latin America and the Caribbean are the victims of these policies. In Mexico alone, tens of thousands of people have been killed in the drug-related violence. And the United States is the source of the problem, a dual source, actually—in terms of demand, which is obvious, and also supply, which is hardly discussed. The guns to the Mexican cartels are increasingly from the United States. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, a federal government bureau, analyzed guns that were confiscated in Mexico. According to their figures, about 70 percent came from the United States.4 Furthermore, the type of guns has been shifting over the years. A couple of years ago, maybe people were smuggling in pistols, now it’s assault rifles.5 Next year who knows what it will be?
This is all connected to the crazy gun culture in the United States. I don’t know if you saw this, but Rand Paul just came out with an appeal for a new organization that will counter the efforts by Obama and Hillary Clinton to shred the last remnants of our sovereignty by allowing the United Nations to take away our guns.6 And then, of course, they will come and conquer us. The basis for this is that the UN is now debating a small arms treaty.7 Small arms doesn’t mean pistols. It means anything less than a tank. These are just slaughtering people all over the world. Hundreds of thousands of people every year are killed with small arms, and a high percentage come from the United States.8 So there is an effort to have some sort of small arms treaty to regulate their flow. In the minds of the Rand Paul libertarians, this is just another effort by this ominous, fiendish outfit, the United Nations, to take away our freedom.