How the Young Are Indoctrinated to Obey (2014)

But this analysis seems really muddled, confused, and all over the place. He liberally attacks conservative politics, yet fails to make a case which supports his assertions as to who is to blame.

I'd also disagree with his assessment of California as having had the best educational system in the world. Wow. Really? Or his assessments that the problem is enrollment freezes or reduced funding. Many other countries do education cheaper, and more effectively.

I'd also argue that public education has, for nearly a century indoctrinated students to be compliant and obedient. This isn't a new thing.

But this is the reason my wife and I will be homeschooling our kids. Not out of a desire to indoctrinate them or whatever, but to save them from being indoctrinated to be docile and subservient. I want our children to be free thinkers, confident in themselves and capable of living outside the box effectively.

I have spent much of my adult life trying to unlearn these lessons. It's really hard work - Being compliant was practically part of my personality.

A side effect of this education which I carried into my professional life was that I often ended up telling my bosses what they wanted to hear instead of what they needed to hear - That might work in sales, but it's not great in engineering. It was mostly because I had this deep seated fear of authority and didn't want to upset them with my words.

Also, strangely, it seems that a lot of project managers tend to react more negatively to cynical projections than actual missed deadlines... Which only reinforces the pattern.

End the loans and the tuition crisis will abate. Yes there will be turmoil as professors making $200k go back to making $100k; but institutions will go back to a true needs based financial aid where students once able to pay $20k in loans above minimal amounts pay minimal amounts again and graduate debt free.

> Public education is under attack around the world, and in response, student protests have recently been held in Britain, Canada, Chile, Taiwan and elsewhere.

What protests are you referring to? When?

> The Los Angeles Times reports...

Link please.

> Similar defunding is under way nationwide.

Since when? I'm not saying he's wrong, but in what year did the federal government last provide what you feel was an appropriate level of funding, and what legislation or federal budget was the beginning of what you consider "defunding"?

>... which was recently dealt yet another crushing blow by the collapse of the housing bubble that was ignored on doctrinal grounds, triggering the current financial crisis.

... The financial crisis that ended in ~2012? That one? This article appears to be from 2014, how was it a "current" crisis?

> Justifications are offered on economic grounds, but are singularly unconvincing. In countries rich to poor, including Mexico next-door, tuition remains free or nominal.

This to me was the only interesting line in the article, in that it gave me something new to think about.

> One illustration is the decision of state colleges to eliminate programs in nursing, engineering and computer science, because they are costly – and happen to be the professions where there is a labor shortage...

Source please?? That's a very bold statement, but a very interesting one if it's true! However without a source I'm inclined to disregard it.

The whole thing reads like it was written by someone wearing a tinfoil hat, and though there are a couple interesting points, it seems like this essay will do more harm than good for his agenda. And just because Chomsky is famous that doesn't make him so authoritative that he's excused from citing his sources.

Some people here on HN already know (I think?) of my 30 seconds of fame that came from being targeted by SUNY for retaliation for my successful run for Student Body President (chronicled in a video project called Campus Coup[0], made by a bunch of us who were there).

But what you might not know is that during that time, I had the pleasure of meeting and receiving the support from many of the brightest faculty (and other) reformers of higher education. Their counsel helped me understand and formulate the following conclusion:

A great move right now is to let the state continue to withdraw funding and at the same time supplant its control over Student Union Buildings, Offices of Residence Life, Offices of Academic Affairs, Academic Deans, and many other areas where it exerts undue control and coercion.

The reality is that, at many of the most politically prominent campuses in the USA - UConn, UMD, Cornell, and my alma mater, New Paltz, among many others - all the best campus functions are being run by faculty or students already, with relatively little management from state officials.

In my estimation, it's possible at each of these schools (and many others) to eliminate or nearly eliminate 3-5 top Student and Academic affairs officials, and their support staff, without anyone noticing for days or even weeks and without any long-term negative impact. It is also likely possible to eliminate their counterparts at the state level, ie SUNY SysAdmin.

This amounts to a savings of thousands of dollars per student per year in SUNY - in fact, it makes it easy to imagine completely eliminating state involvement at these schools. I'm not familiar with the numbers in the other state systems.

It's a very exciting time to be an education activist; there are some incredible students leaders on these campuses, and their level of understanding and sophistication is far beyond what we demonstrated in 2005-2008.

The internet has fomented a culture of knowing every detail of budgeting and recent history, and this has rendered a lot of what "administrators" used to do irrelevant.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lhBceaH_G4&list=PL11F04BB46...

I felt it's political alright but not quite "politics" (e.g., not discussing specific people, or parties) and I felt that the subject (education) is definitely of interest to HN readers. There has been a lot of interest in the past in political subjects, like income distribution (universal wage etc), training and education (coding bootcamps) and generally, issues of equality of opportunities.

I particularly found this passage interesting to me and everyone who has graduated from computer science, especially people from the US:

One illustration is the decision of state colleges to eliminate programs in nursing, engineering and computer science, because they are costly – and happen to be the professions where there is a labor shortage, as The New York Times reports. The decision harms the society but conforms to the business ideology of short-term gain without regard for human consequences, in accord with the vile maxim.

Finally, I didn't think this is likely to cause much controversy, or start any flame wars. I rather expected it to sink off the new entries page with nary an upvote.

Also, I think I forgot to add the year in parens. Sorry about that, too.

“There has been a shift from the belief that we as a nation benefit from higher education, to a belief that it’s the people receiving the education who primarily benefit and so they should foot the bill,”

And I know plenty of people who got through public school without becoming obedient or authoritarian, myself included.

It's certainly possible that some prominent people have expressed such a thing, but connecting it with the actual conduct of education seems problematic.

But I turned out all right.