Noam Chomsky

on MisEducation

The topic that was suggested, which I’m very happy to talk about, is “Democracy and Education.” The phrase democracy and education immediately brings to mind the life and work and thought of one of the outstanding thinkers of the past century, John Dewey, who devoted the greater part of his life and his thought to this array of issues. I guess I should confess a special interest. His thought was a strong influence on me in my formative years in fact, from about age two on, for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into but are real. For much of his life-later he was more skeptical-Dewey seems to have felt that reforms in early education could be in themselves a major lever of social change. They could lead the way to a more just and free society, a society in which, in his words, “the ultimate aim of production is not production of goods, but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality.” This basic commitment, which runs through all of Dewey’s work and thought, is profoundly at odds with the two lead-ing currents of modern social intellectual life; one, strong in his day-he was writing in the 1920s and 1930s about these things is associated with the command economies in Eastern Europe, the systems created by Lenin and Trotsky and turned into an even greater monstrosity by Stalin. The other, the state capitalist industrial society being constructed in the U.S. and much of the West, with the effective rule of private power. These two systems are similar in some fundamental ways, including ideologi-cally. Both were, and one of them remains, deeply authoritarian in fun-damental commitment, and both were very sharply and dramatically opposed to another tradition, the Left libertarian tradition, with roots in Enlightenment values, a tradition that included progressive liberals of the John Dewey variety, independent socialists like Bertrand Russell, lead-ing elements of the Marxist mainstream, mostly anti-Bolshevik, and of course libertarian socialists and various anarchist movements, not to speak of major parts of the labor movement and other popular sectors.

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Let me return to one of Dewey’s central themes, that the ultimate aim of production is not production of goods but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality. That includes, of course, education, which was a prime concern of his. The goal of education, to shift over to Bertrand Russell, is “to give a sense of the value of things other than domination,” to help create “wise citizens of a free community,” to encourage a combination of citizenship with liberty and individual creativeness, which means that we regard “a child as a gardener regards a young tree, as something with a certain intrinsic nature, which will develop into an admirable form, given proper soil and air and light.” In fact, much as they disagreed on many other things, as they did, Dewey and Russell did agree on what Russell called this “hu-manistic conception,” with its roots in the Enlightenment, the idea that education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with wa-ter but, rather, assisting a flower to grow in its own way-an eighteenth-century view that they revived. In other words, providing the circum-stances in which the normal creative patterns will flourish.

Read the rest here: https://www.scribd.com/doc/177531554/Noam-Chomsky-On-Miseducation-pdf