NOAM CHOMSKY ON
AMERICAN EDUCATION
(and more!)

David Barsamian, longtime alternative radio journalist, interviews linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky for the Progressive:

Q: Why do so many people in the United States just go along with U.S. policy?

Chomsky: What's striking is that this view is accepted without coercion. If you're living in a dictatorship or under kings and princes or in a place run by murderous bishops, you'd better take that view or you're in deep trouble. You get burned at the stake or thrown into the gulag or something.

In the West, you don't get in any trouble if you tell the truth, but you still can't do it. Not only can't you tell the truth, you can't think the truth. It's just so deeply embedded, deeply instilled, that without any meaningful coercion it comes out the same way it does in a totalitarian state.

Orwell had some words about this in his unpublished introduction to Animal Farm. He says straight, look, in England what comes out in a free country is not very different from this totalitarian monster that I'm describing in the book. It's more or less the same. How come in a free country? He has two sentences, which are pretty accurate. One, he says, the press is owned by wealthy men who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed. And second--and I think this is much more important--a good education instills in you the intuitive understanding that there are certain things it just wouldn't do to say.

I don't think he goes far enough. I'd say there are certain things it wouldn't do to think. A good education instills in you the intuitive comprehension--it becomes unconscious and reflexive--that you just don't think certain things, things that are threatening to power interests.

Not everyone accepts this. But most of us, if we are honest with ourselves, can look back at our own personal history. For those of us who got into good colleges or the professions, did we stand up to that high school history teacher who told us some ridiculous lie about American history and say, "That's a ridiculous lie. You're an idiot"? No. We said, "All right, I'll keep quiet, and I'll write it in the exam and I'll think, yes, he's an idiot." And it's easy to say and believe things that improve your self-image and your career and that are in other ways beneficial to yourselves.

It's very hard to look in the mirror. We all know this. It's much easier to have illusions about yourself. And in particular, when you think, well, I'm going to believe what I like, but I'll say what the powerful want, you do that over time, and you believe what you say.

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I must admit that thoughts like this one are what first got me thinking about education in a deconstructive way--in my first year of teaching, I watched the Noam Chomsky documentary Manufacturing Consent; at one point in the film Chomsky says that "education is a system of imposed ignorance." The idea stuck with me. After reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, I was convinced: public education teaches us all to obey.

I have looked in this mirror to which Chomsky refers, and I am now disgusted with myself. If one is to survive as a teacher, he must believe in what he is doing. Since learning the hidden truth about our national indoctrinational system, it is impossible for me to believe that I'm doing good work. In fact, every time I punish a kid for breaking a minor rule, or reward a kid for asking how high when I say jump, I'm doing bad work.

Thank God I'm quitting. Continuing as a teacher would eventually drive me insane, or, to paraphrase Chomsky, make me buy into the system. Of the two choices, insanity is preferable.

It's almost May...

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