NOAM CHOMSKY ON MISEDUCATION
From the Introduction by Donaldo Macedo
“Democracy has failed because so many people fear it. They believe that wealth and happiness are so limited that a world full of intelligent healthy and free people is impossible, if not undesirable . . .Such a world, with all its contradictions can be saved, can yet be born again; but not out of capital, interest, property and gold.” W.E.B. Du Bois
Schools in the so-called open and free societies face formidable paradoxical tensions. On the one hand, they are charged with the responsibility of teaching the virtues of democracy, and, on the other hand, they are complicit with the inherent hypocrisy of contemporary democracies, where according to Noam Chomsky, the term democracy ” refers to a system of government in which the business community control the state by virtue of their dominance of the private society, while the population observes quietly. So understood, democracy is a system of elite decision and public ratification, as in the United States itself. Correspondingly, popular involvement in the formation of public policy is considered a serious threat.”
Whereas the ruling class makes no apologies for the undemocratic role of schools, cultural middle management composed of teachers, professionals, and experts is expected, through a reward system, to propagate the myth that schools are democratic sites where democratic values are learned. As cultural middle managers, teachers support “theological truths (or unquestioned truths) so as to legitimate the intuitional role schools play “in a system of control and coercion.”
“Far from creating independent thinkers, schools have always, throughout history, played an institutional role in system of control and coercion. And once you are educated, you have already been socialized in ways that support the power structure, which in turn, rewards you immensely.” Chomsky
As he [Chomsky] energetically stresses, teachers need to sever their complicity with a technocratic training that de-intellectualizes them so they “work primarily to reproduce, legitimate and maintain the dominant social order from which they reap benefits.”
They should become real intellectuals who “have the obligation to serve and tell the truth about things that are important, things that matter.”
Unfortunately Chomsky only discusses education in the first chapter of this book.
The Educational Theory of Noam Chomsky
Democracy and Education
Education is Ignorance
Privatizing Education By Noam Chomsky