Noam Chomsky - Chomsky on MisEducation

Noam Chomsky, author of more than eighty books, is Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His seminal work in linguistics has been cited and debated for five decades, influencing disciplines as diverse as philosophy, sociology, biology, and cognitive sciences. His prolific writings on politics and international affairs are read around the world, in many languages. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Donaldo Macedo is Professor of English and a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Education at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He has published extensively in the areas of Creole languages, critical literacy, bilingualism, and multiculturalism. His publications include: Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (with Paulo Freire, 1987), Literacies of Power: What Americans Are Not Allowed to Know (1994), and Ideology Matters (coauthored with Paulo Freire, forthcoming). His work has been translated in several languages.

Donaldo Macedo: I was intrigued some years back by a twelve-year-old student at Boston Latin School, David Spritzler, who faced disciplinary action for his refusal to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which he considered a hypocritical exhortation to patriotism, in that there is not liberty and justice for all. The question that I want to ask you is why a twelve-year-old boy could readily see through the hypocrisy in the Pledge of Allegiance, while his teacher and administrators could not? I find it mind-boggling that teachers, who by the very nature of their work should consider themselves intellectuals, are unable or willfully refuse to see what is so obvious to one so young.

Noam Chomsky: This is not hard to understand. What you just described is a sign of the deep level of indoctrination that takes place in our schools, making an educated person unable to understand elementary thoughts that any twelve-year-old can understand.

Macedo: I find it mind-boggling that a highly educated teacher and a principal would sacrifice the content in the Pledge of Allegiance in order to impose obedience by demanding that a student recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

Chomsky: I dont find that mind-boggling at all. In fact, what happened to David Spritzler is expected of schools, which are institutions for indoctrination and for imposing obedience. Far from creating independent thinkers, schools have always, throughout history, played an institutional role in a system of control and coercion. And once you are well educated, you have already been socialized in ways that support the power structure, which, in turn, rewards you immensely. Lets take Harvard for example. You dont just learn mathematics at Harvard. In addition, you also learn what is expected of you as a Harvard graduate in terms of behavior and the types of questions that you never ask. You learn the nuances of cocktail parties, how to dress properly, how to develop a Harvard accent.

Macedo: And also how to network within a particular class structure and learn about the objectives, goals, and interests of the dominant class.

Chomsky: Yes. In this case, there is a sharp difference between Harvard and MIT. Although one could safely characterize MIT as a more rightist institution, it is much more open than Harvard. There is a saying around Cambridge that captures this difference: Harvard trains the people that rule the world; MIT trains those who make it work. As a result, there is much less concern with ideological control at MIT, and there is more space for independent thinking. My situation there is a testimony to what I am saying. I have never felt any interference with my political work and activism. With that said, I dont mean that MIT is a hub of political activism. It still falls under an institutional role of avoiding a good part of the truth about the world or about society. Otherwise, it couldnt survive very long if it taught the truth.

Because they dont teach the truth about the world, schools have to rely on beating students over the head with propaganda about democracy. If schools were, in reality, democratic, there would be no need to bombard students with platitudes about democracy. They would simply act and behave democratically, and we know that does not happen. The more there is a need to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system usually is.

This is well known by those who make policy, and sometimes they dont even try to hide it. The Trilateral Commission referred to schools as institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young. The indoctrination is necessary because schools are, by and large, designed to support the interests of the dominant segment of society, those people who have wealth and power. Early on in your education you are socialized to understand the need to support the power structure, primarily corporationsthe business class. The lesson you learn in the socialization through education is that if you dont support the interest of the people who have wealth and power, you dont survive very long. You are just weeded out of the system or marginalized. And schools succeed in the indoctrination of the youthborrowing the Trilateral Commissions phrasingby operating within a propaganda framework that has the effect of distorting or suppressing unwanted ideas and information.

Macedo: How can these intellectuals who operate within the propaganda framework get away with their complicity in the falsehoods they propagate in the service of the powerful interests?

Chomsky: They are not getting away with anything. They are, in fact, performing a service that is expected of them by the institutions for which they work, and they willingly, perhaps unconsciously, fulfill the requirements of the doctrinal system. This is like hiring a carpenter and, when he does the job he is contracted to do, asking how he got away with it. He performed as expected. Well, intellectuals provide a very similar service. They perform as they are expected to by giving a tolerably accurate description of reality that conforms with the interests of the people who have wealth and powerthe people who own these institutions that we call schools and in fact own the society generally.

Macedo: It is clear that intellectuals have historically played an inglorious role in support of the doctrinal system. Given their less-than-honorable posture, can they be considered intellectuals in the true sense of the term? You have often referred to some Harvard professors as commissars. I also find that term more appropriate than intellectual, given their complicity in the power structure and their functionary roles in support of civilizing values that in many instances have produced just the opposite: human misery, genocide, slavery, and wholesale exploitation of the masses.

Chomsky: Historically, that has been almost exactly the case. Going back to the time of the Bible, the intellectuals who later were called false prophets worked for specific interests of those in power. We know that there were dissident intellectuals at the time who had an alternative view of the world, the ones later called prophetsa dubious translation of an obscure word. Well, these intellectuals were marginalized, tortured, or sent into exile. Things havent changed much in our time. Intellectuals who dissent remain marginalized in most societies, and in places like El Salvador they are just butchered. That is what happened to Archbishop Romero and the six Jesuit intellectuals who were killed by elite troops that [the United States] trained, armed, and supported with our tax dollars. One Salvadorean Jesuit correctly pointed out in his journal that, for example, in their country Vaclav Havel (the former political prisoner who became president of Czechoslovakia) wouldnt have been put in jail; he would have been hacked to pieces and left by the side of the road. Vaclav Havel, who became the darling dissident for the West, repaid his Western supporters handsomely when he addressed the U.S. Congress a few weeks after the six Jesuits in El Salvador were murdered. Instead of showing solidarity with his comrade dissidents in El Salvador, he praised and extolled Congress as the defender of freedom. The scandal is so obvious that it requires no comment.