Noam Chomsky: Education is Ignorance (1995) | Hacker News Reader

Noam Chomsky: Education is Ignorance (1995)

chomsky.info

119 pointsmapleoin53 comments

Just a heads up: Most of this interview is not about education, it's about the history of the corporation, and the history of anti/pro capitalist philosophy.

As for the juicy quote in the title of the post, it's not that elaborated on. (Not because Chomsky is hand-waving, it seems it got muttered as an aside in an interview that was about other stuff.)

This was an interesting interview, but not very satiating for those of us hungry for some meaty critique of education.

(Not that I pour over those posts on HN every day ;D )

Huh, the entire last Q-A pair are on Education...

There's a good amount down there.

I didn't mean to dismiss the interview, just lower expectations that the page was about explaining the point in the title, it's not.

You're totally right that last 3 paragraphs are about education, but even most of one of them he detours into "You'll find the same thing with the press...," and talks about the media.

I don't want to tell anybody not to read it, but I'll just say I got really excited about the title, but then a little bummed out the link didn't necessarily defend that point very well. I don't mean that as a dis of Chomsky, it was a casual interview, not a vigorous essay.

You can listen to podcasts of Chomsky. His live talks help put this quote into context. He speaks often at Universities. Some of the questions he fields are kind of sad, and Chomsky is quite civil to the kids that basically want him to refute his own positions. If, on the other hand, you listen to his debate with Richard Perl, for example, you hear his opponent, clearly a public intellectual and a capable debater, take positions like: "we were right to blockade, bomb and terrorize. It is and was in the national interest." Does this help with perspective? I think an example like this can be to the point without being or becoming a tautology, though it is close. The kids sometimes don't seem to have benefitted from their embarrassment of riches in the field of education....

If, on the other hand, you listen to his debate with Richard Perl...

Or you could watch the Harvard debate he had with Alan Dershowitz on Israel where he wasn't particularly convincing, or better yet the passage of _The Blank Slate_ where Steven Pinker completely skewers Chomsky's nonsensical position on human nature in its relation to economic systems.

Thanks. I'll check these as soon as I have a second.

So, you go back to the mid-nineteenth century and these so-called "factory girls," young girls working in the Lowell [Massachusetts] mills, were reading serious contemporary literature. They recognized that the point of the system was to turn them into tools who would be manipulated, degraded, kicked around, and so on.

Source? My impression was that the point of the system was to make money, and that the girls were adequately treated ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_Mill_Girls ). The main thing that sucked was super long hours. Many of the Lowell girls came from family farms that had too many mouths to feed. If a family produces more children than the farm can support, there is no escaping the hard life, no matter the political or economic system.

It was done mostly by courts and lawyers and the power they could exercise over individual states. New Jersey was the first state to offer corporations any right they wanted. Of course, all the capital in the country suddenly started to flow to New Jersey, for obvious reasons.

The corporation is a construct of contract law. There is no reason for it to be ratified by legislation. And contract law simply allows for scalable, voluntary transactions. And scalable voluntary transactions allow people to build large productive organizations that make stuff people want - cars, lightbulbs, transistors, etc.

It was a conscious design which worked as Adam Smith said: the principal architects of policy consolidate state power and use it for their interests.

No argument here. But note that this is basically an immutable law of history. You'll have the same luck ranting against it as ranting against "death and taxes". That's why anarcho-anything is a dead end. If you write abaout political matters with a goal of influencing policy, you're best off coming up with ideas that are mutually beneficial to both the state and the public.

It's basically court decisions and lawyers' decisions, which created a form of private tyranny which is now more massive in many ways than even state tyranny was.

That's simply false. And the massive corporations that seem most soulless and Dilbert-like, often are basically arms of the state ( ie, government contractors like IBM).

A lot of the educational system is designed for that, if you think about it, it's designed for obedience and passivity.

Once upon a time the idea of the school system was designed for obedience and passivity. But Supreme Court cases in the 1970's have made effective discipline in schools impossible. As a result, the education system circa 2009 is Lord of the Flies.

>> It's basically court decisions and lawyers' decisions, which created a form of private tyranny which is now more massive in many ways than even state tyranny was.

> That's simply false. And the massive corporations that seem most soulless and Dilbert-like, often are basically arms of the state ( ie, government contractors like IBM).

No, wrong.

http://reclaimdemocracy.org/personhood/index.html

Corporate personhood is not in the constitution, and being a 'natural person' came out as an unofficial side-effect of Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, 1886 - A judge verbally said he thought that corporations had 14th amendment 'natural person' rights, that got added to the header by a clerk, and got quoted and treated as though it was caselaw. Perhaps you think we're arguing past each other, 'natural personhood' != tyranny, but without 'the right to petition govt', free speech, and be free from 'unreasonable search' etc, they wouldn't have nearly the legal protection & power that they do.

A corporation is simply a contractual agreement between people. If a husband and wife share ownership of a house, the government cannot search or seize the house. If a hundred shareholders share ownership of a factory, they are still protected from the government searching or seizing the factory.

Perhaps the judge in the Santa Clara case made the right decision for the wrong reason. I do think it's incorrect to view the corporation as a "person". A corporation is a contractual agreement concerning shared property. A corporation does not have rights, the people who own it have rights (which in practice is the same thing).

A corporation has legal "personhood" independent of its managers and stockholders, in the sense that if the corporation becomes insolvent, its creditors can only get at the assets of the corporation itself. You can't get this kind of protection with contracts alone, which is why a new legal structure was created for corporations.

Limited liability is simply a matter of contract between the lender and the owners of the corporate structure. When a bank lends money to an LLC, the contract is that the bank can only seize the assets of the corporate structure, not of the owners. If the bank does not like this deal, they can refuse to make the loan. In fact, many banks will refuse to lend to small LLC's. They will insist that the owner pledge his own assets.

Another way of thinking of it, is that equity holders hold the most junior debt. The idea that senior debt holders could come back and make the junior debt holders pay up more is ridiculous.

Now, I do think that owners (and bond holders) should in some cases be liable for third party torts and criminal activities of the company. I don't know what the actual law is about this issue. If there is never any liability, that's a mistake. But I doubt that's the case.

I agree with you, and unfortunately I must tell you that liability is indeed limited or erased. So, yes, it's a mistake.

the girls were adequately treated

Did you even read the Wikipedia link you cited? The one which says this:

Conditions in the Lowell mills were severe by modern American standards. Employees worked from five am until seven pm, for an average 73 hours per week. Each room usually had 80 women working at machines, with two male overseers managing the operation. The noise of the machines was described by one worker as "something frightful and infernal", and although the rooms were hot, windows were often kept closed during the summer so that conditions for thread work remained optimal. The air, meanwhile, was filled with particles of thread and cloth.

About 25 women lived in each boardinghouse, with up to six sharing a bedroom. One worker described her quarters as "a small, comfortless, half-ventilated apartment containing some half a dozen occupants"...

Women were also given opportunities to attend concerts and lectures, in addition to experiencing city life. Still, at least one observer reported that most women worked so that a male relative could obtain an education. "I have known more than one to give every cent of her wages," she writes, "month after month, to her brother, that he might get the education necessary to enter some profession."

Yeah, I guess this is more than adequate by the standards of a slave. Which is exactly Chomsky's point -- and the point of the contemporary writers and labor organizers which he is citing:

The Lowell girls' organizing efforts were notable not only for the "unfeminine" participation of women, but also for the political framework used to appeal to the public. Framing their struggle for shorter work days and better pay as a matter of rights and personal dignity, they sought to place themselves in the larger context of the American Revolution. During the 1834 "turn-out" or strike – they warned that "the oppressing hand of avarice would enslave us,"...

one worker as "something frightful and infernal", and although the rooms were hot, windows were often kept closed during the summer so that conditions for thread work remained optimal. The air, meanwhile, was filled with particles of thread and cloth.

Keep in mind that the source for this comes from a labor union organizer, and that this seems to be the worst they could find. From the original source, the quality of the air did not seem bad enough for the factory girls to be noticeably bothered by it.

You might want to balance your view with the writing of a woman who actually worked in the mill (http://books.google.com/books?id=RgwCAAAAYAAJ&printsec=f...): "I do not recall any particular hardship connected with this life, except getting up so early in the morning, and to this habit, I never was, and never shall be, reconciled, for it has taken nearly a lifetime for me to make up the sleep lost at that early age. But in every other respect it was a pleasant life. We were not hurried any more than was for our good, and no more work was required of us than we were able easily to do."

I suggest you read the book, it's a very different picture than you'll get from Chomsky or the labor organizers.

I'm not arguing that factory life didn't suck by our standards. But it wasn't some plot to keep the foot on the neck of woman or laborers. Life was hard because they simply weren't as wealthy back then, and so they had to work hard at whatever they did. The factory life was better than the alternatives, or else the woman would not have worked their.

One of Chomsky's strongest works as a non-linguist is his "American Power and the New Mandarins." (1967, 1968) In it you can find sections titled: "On the responsibility of intellectuals" and "some thoughts on Intellectuals and the Schools." He also co-authored "Manufacturing Consent."

In "Power" he relays an anecdote about seeing, in the Smithsonian, I believe, an exhibit wherein museum goers could interact with a (Vietnamese) jungle scene. The interaction was to take hold of a 50 caliber mounted in a mock-up of a helicopter and shoot at villagers. That exhibit was designed and constructed by someone. Presumably someone who had a "good job" at the museum.

We are designers, most of us. And I for one can't help thinking sometimes: How much designing do I really do? Clearly if I define myself as a non-intellectual, my responsibility doesn't really change. I know that I am both educated and trained but that has not yet made me free. So what do I have: Theoretical freedom without socialism. Oh, and illusion...lots of illusion.

CHOMSKY: First of all, I'm usually fuming inside, so what you see on the outside isn't necessarily what's inside. But as far as questions, the only thing I ever get irritated about is elite intellectuals, the stuff they do I do find irritating.

Oh, the irony

I'm sure he has his own definition, it's just that the interviewer never bothered to ask for a point of clarification.

I don't trust a scientist who's "usually fuming inside". People who fume inside are people who are already pretty sure they're right about everything, which is not an appropriate disposition for a scholar.

I passionately disagree that the intellectual must remain dispassionate. But what you are saying is in fact considered a rarely challenged truism in humanities departments. It is considered very distasteful for an academic to speak publicly about current events, politics, or really anything controversial. But I think, and I know there is a very strong anti-academic current here on HN, that the intellectual plays a similar role to the free press in a democratic society. He is morally obliged to speak out when he sees the society being duped, coerced by the powerful, or being robbed of its freedoms. The academic intellectuals repeatedly fail us in this in the United States, and I admire Chomsky because he is one of the very few with the integrity to perform his moral duty.

Being passionate != thinking you're right about everything.

Thinking you're right about one thing is more than enough.

I know there is a very strong anti-academic current here on HN...

You know. Really? How? What's the basis for your claim?

I confess I'm having a hard time giving you the benefit of the doubt here.

Three of YCombinator's founders have PhD's from Harvard. A number of other users are graduate students, professors, or researchers in industry, and I've never noticed any animus toward them. A significant fraction of the submissions to this site deal with new research, and generally cast it in a positive light. Doesn't all this suggest HN would be more than ordinarily sympathetic to academics, not less?

Sorry, but that's wrong. If two people have read a book and disagree about the meaning of a given section, then it's perfectly reasonable to expect both sides to be dispassionate as they dissect the passage in question. But what Chomsky is saying (in the context of this article) is that it makes him angry when people disagree with his interpretations of books they haven't read.

When you say scholars should be dispassionate about this, you're basically saying that a book review written by someone who hasn't read the book should be treated with equal respect as a book review written by someone who has. This seems profoundly anti-intellectual to me.

"People who fume inside are people who are already pretty sure they're right about everything"

How does that follow?

They're fuming because the rest of the word doesn't recognise that they're right.

Isn't that just an assumption? There are other reasons to fume.

Of course - I was just making a guess as to the most likely one.

Aside from the fact that you're isolating a quote out of context, I think you're wrong. I won't speak for Mr. Chomsky, but personally, I don't get angry with people because I'm pretty sure I'm right about everything (I know I'm not), but because I'm pretty sure that they're wrong. It's a very different reason, and I think it is wholly legitimate to be upset by people who are insistent about their ignorance and stupidity.

He suffers as the protagonist in xkcd/386 does, except not just about the Internet.

Only ironic if you take it out of context:

    BARSAMIAN: ....You're very patient with people,
    particularly people who ask the most inane kinds of
    questions. Is this something you've cultivated?

    CHOMSKY: First of all, I'm usually fuming inside, so
    what you see on the outside isn't necessarily what's
    inside. But as far as questions, the only thing I ever
    get irritated about is elite intellectuals, the stuff
    they do I do find irritating. I shouldn't. I should
    expect it. But I do find it irritating. But on the
    other hand, what you're describing as inane questions
    usually strike me as perfectly honest questions. People
    have no reason to believe anything other than what
    they're saying. If you think about where the
    questioner is coming from, what the person has been
    exposed to, that's a very rational and intelligent
    question. It may sound inane from some other point of
    view, but it's not at all inane from within the
    framework in which it's being raised. It's usually
    quite reasonable. So there's nothing to be irritated
    about.

I basically read that as:

    Interviewer: Do you get angry when people ask you inane
    questions?

    Chomsky: Only when the person asking it should know
    better.

Whether or not Chomsky and the interviewer's idea of what constitutes an inane question is the same as mine or yours may be grounds for criticism. But just quoting the bit that you did out of context is dishonest, and definitely fits with my idea of what constitutes an inane comment.

I disagree with your interpretation: according to his reply, the inane questions come from the non-elites, people with "intellectual confinement", and so on.

I left a link to this article in a comment a few hours ago, and it's a great feeling to then see it lead to the front page where hundreds of people can read about something I think is of great interest and importance.

Chomsky on YC?! Voted up! Read this a few years ago-- great to give it another look.

Thanks.

I was intrigued by the Adam Smith quote:

>[Adam Smith] says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits.

I read the context around that Adam Smith quote. As I interpret it, Smith's solution was not preventing the division of labor; it was improving education.

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations...generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.

...

[C]ommon people...have little time to spare for education. Their parents can scarce afford to maintain them even in infancy. As soon as they are able to work they must apply to some trade by which they can earn their subsistence.

...

But though the common people cannot, in any civilised society, be so well instructed as people of some rank and fortune, the most essential parts of education, however, to read, write, and account, can be acquired at so early a period of life that the greater part even of those who are to be bred to the lowest occupations have time to acquire them before they can be employed in those occupations. For a very small expense the public can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education.

The public can facilitate this acquisition by establishing in every parish or district a little school, where children may be taught for a reward so moderate that even a common labourer may afford it...In Scotland the establishment of such parish schools has taught almost the whole common people to read, and a very great proportion of them to write and account...If in those little schools the books, by which the children are taught to read, were a little more instructive than they commonly are, and if, instead of a little smattering of Latin, which the children of the common people are sometimes taught there, and which can scarce ever be of any use to them, they were instructed in the elementary parts of geometry and mechanics, the literary education of this rank of people would perhaps be as complete as it can be.

...

The public can impose upon almost the whole body of the people the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education, by obliging every man to undergo an examination or probation in them before he can obtain the freedom in any corporation, or be allowed to set up any trade either in a village or town corporate.

Smith just wanted public education. He didn't mention preventing the division of labor.

I invoked Rothbard's Law.

"everyone specializes in what he is worst at"

Chomsky is no exception. For a brilliant linguist, he know little of economics. Chomsky is known to advocate anarcho-syndicalism, which seem to be "democratic"(Which I believe to percisely opposite to the anarchistic etho)

Chomsky is known to advocate anarcho-syndicalism, which seem to be democratic (Which I believe to percisely opposite to the anarchistic etho)

Um, you know nothing about anarchism. The first person to call himself an anarchist was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, whose most famous line is "property is theft". The first international was made up primarily of communists, led by Marx, and anarchists, led by Bakunin. Bakunin and the anarchists split from the international because they thought Marx's ideas would lead to totalitarianism. Bakunin's famous line is (paraphrasing):

"freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice, socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality"

Democratic may be the opposite of what you think of as anarchism, but what you think of as anarchism has no basis in history. You should probably choose a different word.

The anarchists who fought against Franco in the Spanish civil war, and who for a brief moment actually implemented anarchism in the real world, were explicitly anarcho-syndicalists.

Um, Pierre-Jopesph Proundhourn also claim "property is freedom". I also derives my political heritage from indiviualist anarchists such as Lysander Spooner.

I know about the Spanish civil war and Proudhourn as well the socialist heritage of anarchism thank you very much!

The only thing anarchists of different stride have in common with each other is they accuse each other of being non-anarchists. Thus the attempt to define each other out of existence.

(I consider democracy evil because it is two wolf and one sheep deciding what to eat for dinner)

For a brilliant linguist, he know little of economics.

This is true, but he doesn't claim to know much about economics. He pretty explicitly doesn't care about economics. He's the De Morgan dual of right-wingers who care only about productivity growth and don't care at all about distribution issues.

Given that, everything he says about the popular (mis-)understanding of Adam Smith is true.

EDIT: take for example this hacker news thread ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=489024 ) where:

1. a guy posits Adam Smith's labor theory of value

2. gets told he should read Adam Smith to correct his mistaken ideas

3. quotes Adam Smith to back up his previous statement

4. gets told he's misinterpreting something

It's crazy really.

"Which is a sign of how efficient the educational system has been, and the propaganda system, in simply destroying even our awareness of our own immediate intellectual background."

lord god the sky is falling.

my response to ridiculous statements such as this one is always "where the holy fuck do you live"???

teachers struggle to get 99% of the kids to give a damn about anything beyond sports sex music and games. the few who do give a damn can find and read anything they want.

where is it different?

Asking WHY is a taboo in most of the school education.

Taboo or just that the teachers haven't the slightest?

Education is obedience, knowledge is power.

There is a big difference.

Flagged; flamebait.

I must be new here, this is first time I've seen a post [dead]. Does this count as "the community defending itself"? This article was the top link when I first saw it, I found it a good read. Not even any distracting ads.

Anyone have a link to the list of [dead] articles?

I believe there is a "showdead" feature.

Seriously, tho', Chomsky? Would an Ann Coulter diatribe last as long?

I love the idea that Chomsky fills the Coulter niche for a certain audience.

> the Coulter niche for a certain audience

Michael Moore is the closest I could come up with. What makes Coulter unique is that she actively tries to offend liberals. I can't really think of anyone famous for trying to offend conservatives (although lots of people have become "almost famous" that way.)

They're not alike in their tones or most famous aspects -- but their appeal to their ardent fans is similar. "Here's truth that the [corporate|liberal] media contrives to obscure." Each offers a mostly self-consistent (but in other ways bizarro) world to make their audiences feel among the enlightened minority.

I happen to think both sometimes make useful and thought-provoking points, though followup conversations about them are prone to derailment into all sorts of superficial reactions and over-rehearsed ideological set-pieces.

I agree with "both sometimes make useful and thought-provoking points".

The problem is that these people create true believers. The world could really use sane alternate viewpoints -- and we mainly get lots of conspiracy theorists unable to change viewpoints.

I would be interested in a citation for this observation as far as Coulter goes.

I am European, so the only thing I know about Coulter is that she is some form of right wing crazy; a less formally polite Chomsky... :-)

That is also more than I care to know; the US extreme left/right looks equally insane. I just wish neither was popular here. But I guess you get the good with the bad.

I agreed with a quote as a way of saying that they generate hypotheses that probably aren't correct, but potentially fruitful to work from.

Me too. It really shook me to the core when it suddenly turned up dead since I found it such an interesting read, and I couldn't understand what seemed to be arbitrary deletion.

I guess I gotta read more about HN works and why such things can go from #1 to dead in moments.

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