Noam Chomsky Spells Out the Purpose of Education

E + duc­ere: “To lead or draw out.” The ety­mo­log­i­cal Latin roots of “edu­ca­tion.” Accord­ing to a for­mer Jesuit pro­fes­sor of mine, the fun­da­men­tal sense of the word is to draw oth­ers out of “dark­ness,” into a “more mag­nan­i­mous view” (he’d say, his arms spread wide). As inspi­ra­tional as this speech was to a sem­i­nar group of bud­ding high­er edu­ca­tors, it failed to spec­i­fy the means by which this might be done, or the rea­son. Lack­ing a Jesuit sense of mis­sion, I had to fig­ure out for myself what the “dark­ness” was, what to lead peo­ple towards, and why. It turned out to be sim­pler than I thought, in some respects, since I con­clud­ed that it was­n’t my job to decide these things, but rather to present points of view, a col­lec­tion of methods—an intel­lec­tu­al toolk­it, so to speak—and an enthu­si­as­tic mod­el. Then get out of the way. That’s all an edu­ca­tor can, and should do, in my hum­ble opin­ion. Any­thing more is not edu­ca­tion, it’s indoc­tri­na­tion. Seemed sim­ple enough to me at first. If only it were so. Few things, in fact, are more con­tentious (Google the term “assault on edu­ca­tion,” for exam­ple).

What is the dif­fer­ence between edu­ca­tion and indoc­tri­na­tion? This debate rages back hun­dreds, thou­sands, of years, and will rage thou­sands more into the future. Every major philoso­pher has had one answer or anoth­er, from Pla­to to Locke, Hegel and Rousseau to Dewey. Con­tin­u­ing in that ven­er­a­ble tra­di­tion, lin­guist, polit­i­cal activist, and aca­d­e­m­ic gen­er­al­ist extra­or­di­naire Noam Chom­sky, one of our most con­sis­tent­ly com­pelling pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als, has a lot to say in the video above and else­where about edu­ca­tion.

First, Chom­sky defines his view of edu­ca­tion in an Enlight­en­ment sense, in which the “high­est goal in life is to inquire and cre­ate. The pur­pose of edu­ca­tion from that point of view is just to help peo­ple to learn on their own. It’s you the learn­er who is going to achieve in the course of edu­ca­tion and it’s real­ly up to you to deter­mine how you’re going to mas­ter and use it.” An essen­tial part of this kind of edu­ca­tion is fos­ter­ing the impulse to chal­lenge author­i­ty, think crit­i­cal­ly, and cre­ate alter­na­tives to well-worn mod­els. This is the ped­a­gogy I end­ed up adopt­ing, and as a col­lege instruc­tor in the human­i­ties, it’s one I rarely have to jus­ti­fy.

Chom­sky defines the oppos­ing con­cept of edu­ca­tion as indoc­tri­na­tion, under which he sub­sumes voca­tion­al train­ing, per­haps the most benign form. Under this mod­el, “Peo­ple have the idea that, from child­hood, young peo­ple have to be placed into a frame­work where they’re going to fol­low orders. This is often quite explic­it.” (One of the entries in the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary defines edu­ca­tion as “the train­ing of an ani­mal,” a sense per­haps not too dis­tinct from what Chom­sky means). For Chom­sky, this mod­el of edu­ca­tion impos­es “a debt which traps stu­dents, young peo­ple, into a life of con­for­mi­ty. That’s the exact oppo­site of what tra­di­tion­al­ly comes out of the Enlight­en­ment.” In the con­test between these two definitions—Athens vs. Spar­ta, one might say—is the ques­tion that plagues edu­ca­tion­al reform­ers at the pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary lev­els: “Do you train for pass­ing tests or do you train for cre­ative inquiry?”

Chom­sky goes on to dis­cuss the tech­no­log­i­cal changes in edu­ca­tion occur­ring now, the focus of innu­mer­able dis­cus­sions and debates about not only the pur­pose of edu­ca­tion, but also the prop­er meth­ods (a sub­ject this site is deeply invest­ed in), includ­ing the cur­rent unease over the shift to online over tra­di­tion­al class­room ed or the val­ue of a tra­di­tion­al degree ver­sus a cer­tifi­cate. Chomsky’s view is that tech­nol­o­gy is “basi­cal­ly neu­tral,” like a ham­mer that can build a house or “crush someone’s skull.” The dif­fer­ence is the frame of ref­er­ence under which one uses the tool. Again, mas­sive­ly con­tentious sub­ject, and too much to cov­er here, but I’ll let Chom­sky explain. What­ev­er you think of his pol­i­tics, his eru­di­tion and expe­ri­ence as a researcher and edu­ca­tor make his views on the sub­ject well worth con­sid­er­ing.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.