The academic talks about education and indoctrination, ISIS, and the media in a new interview.
October 13, 2014
This article first appeared on Truthout.
History
teacher Dan Falcone and English teacher Saul Isaacson spoke with Noam
Chomsky in his Cambridge office on September 16, 2014, about education
and indoctrination, the 1960s, the Powell memorandum, democracy, the
creation of ISIS, the media and the way "capitalism" actually works in
the United States.
Dan Falcone: We're in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, with Professor Noam Chomsky. I am Dan Falcone with Saul
Isaacson, and this is actually the third time I've visited you. So I
wanted to thank you for that. And since I am a teacher, I wanted to
start off by continuing on the themes of democracy and education.
I
have noticed students making very insightful and uplifting observations
in the midst of chaos. For example, they noticed that support for
Israel fell out of favor in certain mainstream circles, and that the
recent police treatment of unarmed black teenagers in intensifying areas
of violence is a crucial matter of concern. This, to me, is an example
of reasons to be hopeful. Can this type of thinking be traced to the
work done in the 1960s or is that an oversimplification in your view?
Noam Chomsky:
I think the activism of the 1960s had a very definite civilizing effect
on the whole society in all kinds of ways. So lots of things that by
now are almost taken for granted were heretical in the 1960s. We had
anti-sodomy laws until not many years ago.
When people denounced
[former Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad for rejecting and
criminalizing homosexuality, it should be remembered that was true of
the United States until very recently. Women's rights were unheard of.
Civil rights proponents were horribly treated, not just in the South. It
was awful there, but pretty bad here. Environmental issues did not
exist. Opposition to aggression was virtually zero. In fact, so little,
that to this day, even scholarship mentions the Vietnam War as beginning
in 1965.
By 1965, South Vietnam had already been practically
destroyed. At least a couple of hundred thousand US troops were ravaging
and began the attack on the north. You literally could not have
mentioned this in Boston, which is a liberal city. The first time we
tried to have a public antiwar demonstration on the Boston Common, which
is where everything takes place, it was broken up; [we] couldn't have
it. It was October 1965. I was supposed to be a speaker. Nobody could
hear the speakers. The Boston Globe - the most liberal newspaper in the
country - the next day, you can look it up on the internet, was full of
denunciations of these people who were daring to question the validity
of the bombing of North Vietnam. I mean, this is five years into the
war. There's nothing like that anymore.
The Iraq War, for example,
is the first war in history, in which there were huge demonstrations
before the war was launched, not beginning five years later and then
being broken up. All of these are changes, and the people who are
writing in journals today lived through these changes. They were all
affected, and so I think you and your students' perceptions are correct.
It's kind of interesting and sick that the intellectual culture called
the 1960s, "time of troubles," a dangerous period in which a lot of harm
was done to the society. And the reason is because we were civilized
and that's dangerous. That increased the commitment to democracy, to
rights and so on, and this left people much less obedient.
There's actually a classic presentation of this which maybe we discussed, so stop me, but the study of The Crisis of Democracy,
a very important book which was published. It's the first publication
of the Trilateral Commission, which was a group of liberal
internationalists. For example, the Carter administration was entirely
drawn from their ranks. It's basically where they come from; so kind of
the liberal end of the mainstream spectrum.
The Crisis of Democracy
was published in 1975, and it was a discussion of the destructive
effect of the 1960s. The destructive effect was that it called for too
much democracy. You have to read it to believe it. The picture was that
before, people were mostly passive and obedient and they did what they
were told and democracy functioned fine.
But in the 1960s, various
parts of the population became energized and began to enter the public
arena to call for the rights of women, students, young people, old
people, farmers and workers. What are called "special interests" -
meaning the whole population - they began to press to enter the public
arena. And they said that puts too much pressure on the state and
therefore we have to have more moderation in democracy and they should
go back and be quiet and obedient.
There's interestingly one group
that they never discussed as a special interest, corporate power, which
makes sense. That's the national interest, so we don't talk about that.
But, of course, they have overwhelming control over policy and they
particularly singled out the universities. Schools, churches,
universities - they describe them as institutions responsible for "the
indoctrination of the young" - their phrase, indoctrination of the
young. And they said they're failing. You can see it because all these
young kids are out in the street, opposing the war, calling for women's
rights and so on.
So the young are not being indoctrinated
properly and they therefore called for more efforts to - the state, they
said, should intervene to ensure that indoctrination takes place
properly. They also criticized the media. Anyone who looked at the media
could see that it's overwhelmingly conformist. But there was some
criticism. I mean, there were people in the media who were saying, "The
war's too costly. Maybe we shouldn't continue with it" and so on. And
they said even that's too much. You can't have the media being this
oppositional and critical of power. So maybe the state should step in
with some form of censorship and control over the media.
This is
the liberal extreme of the spectrum. If you want to see the other
extreme, one important thing to look at, which came out around the same
time, is the Powell Memorandum. You can pick it up on the internet. This
is Justice Powell. He was picked by Nixon to be on the Supreme Court.
He was an advisor to the Nixon administration, very right-wing, and he
essentially expresses the same views except in a less polite form. And
you have to read it to believe it. It was very influential. It was a
letter written to the Chamber of Commerce, a business group, but it
surfaced pretty quickly. It was supposed to be secret.
But what he
essentially says - and the rhetoric is revealing, almost quoting, he
says, "Marxists have taken over practically everything. They run the
universities. They run the media. There're overwhelming attacks on
business. Business is being persecuted. Nobody's standing up for
business. We're the persecuted minority and the world is lost," which is
a very interesting illustration of the attitude of people who own
everything. If you owned everything and a tiny little piece gets out of
control, then your world's gone. Like some unusual child who has a
million toys and one of them is stolen, he's going to perish.
That's
the standard attitude of people who fundamentally own the world. And
then he goes on to talk about how we can deal with this. He says, look,
take the universities. The universities are funded by business. The
trustees are from the business world. Instead of just allowing the
universities to be taken over by Marxists led by Herbert Marcuse and so
on, which is such an illusion you can't even talk about it. Instead of
that, he says, "We could discipline them by using the power of the
purse, which we have, and we can oppose it and we can defend this." It's
all defensive. We can defend ourselves from this tremendous attack by
using our economic power to sort of allow business a tiny little sector
in which it can function.
You really have to read it to get the
sense. Well, those are the two ends of the spectrum and out of that
comes the whole liberal assault, the population on the colleges, on the
schools and so on. So the students are right. There was a big impact and
it's partly illustrated by the reaction, but it's there. You can see it
in all kinds of ways. It's just a much more civilized world than it
was.
Falcone: Just recently in the Myth of the Spoiled Child,
a book by Alfie Kohn, he systematically discredits this belief that
children are spoiled. He seems to challenge the standard bipartisan
effort that undermines democratic education and drives it toward a
business model or corporate setting for education. In other words, the
standard complaint by those parents or educators whether liberal or
conservative, is that no matter what the tactic, old school or new,
education is still compliance-based, while focusing little on
development. What are your thoughts on his sentiments, which are
probably the same as a Jonathan Kozol?
Chomsky:
I think they're basically right. Both Kozol and Kohn, and others too,
are focusing on what traces back to the kinds of attitudes that are
expressed in the books I mentioned across the spectrum. Maybe people
didn't follow those particular prescriptions, but these are reflected as
very widely held views, which is why the '60s are called "the times of
troubles" by "real" intellectuals. And out of that comes the sense that,
yes, you have to improve the institutions responsible for
indoctrination of the young. You have to control children. You have to
make sure that they're not too free and creative and independent, and it
shows up in all sorts of ways.
So, for example, take say the
neighborhood where I live. We moved there 50 years ago. It's a quiet
neighborhood out in the suburbs. No traffic on the streets, practically
none; woods in the back where the kids can play. When we moved, we moved
there mainly because we had young children. It looked like a great
place for children to grow up and kids were all over the streets. We had
a couple of little girls playing out in the woods by themselves and so
on. You go in that neighborhood now you'd never see a child.
If I
take a walk, occasionally I'll see an adult with a dog and sometimes
they'll have to drag a child along with them that didn't want to be
there. But in general, there are no kids playing. Back in the woods
behind our house, for example, there's a tree, which for children
automatically is a climbing tree. It's just perfect. As soon as a kid
sees it, they want to climb.
Back in the '60s and '70s, that tree
over the summer became a cooperative, a spontaneous activity for the
kids in the neighborhood. Each kid would bring a piece of wood and
they'd put it up and somebody would bring something else, and by fall
you had this elaborate construction up in the tree of tree houses and
kids playing and running around and so on.
You take a walk now,
the tree's bare. Children are not allowed out. They don't play. They're
either inside looking at video games or something or they're in
organized activities. I've seen it in the most amazing ways. Look, I
have a grandson who's in his 20s, but when he was a kid, he loved
sports. So he wanted to play soccer and basketball and everything.
But
the only way to do it was to be in a league. It happened to be Salem,
so he was in the Salem baseball league or something. I remember once my
wife and I went out to watch him one Saturday afternoon. He wanted us to
come out. He was 7 years old. There were two teams of 7-year-old kids
playing soccer. Now, the referee was 11 years old. The parents were
standing on the sideline screaming at the referee and ready to kill him
because somebody had pushed their kid and he didn't do something about
it.
I remember once we went over to his house on another Saturday
afternoon. He was to play a baseball game. He came back about half an
hour later very unhappy. We asked him what happened. They said they had
to call off the game. The kids were about 10. They had to call off the
game because the other team only had eight players. So therefore the
kids couldn't play baseball. Everybody's sitting around. But they
couldn't allow their teammate to be the ninth player for the other team
so that the kids could have some fun because it has to be run by adults
so that the league works the way it does.
And this just goes on
and on. I mean, childhood is just being lost and in the schools you see
the same thing. Well, you know better than I do that the indoctrination
is incredible. The Bush-Obama programs are programs for training kids
for the Marine Corps. And I think they're purposely done that way. It
undermines the independence of teachers. If kids are studying for a
test, they're not going to learn anything. We all know that from our own
experience. You study for a test and pass it and you forget what the
topic was, you know. And I presume that this is all pretty conscious.
How conscious are they? I don't know, but they're reflections of the
attitude that you have to have discipline, passivity, obedience, the
kind of independence and creativity that we were shown in the '60s and
since then - it's just dangerous.
Falcone: Faith
Agostinone-Wilson has conducted some educational research that's similar
to Henry Giroux's in that she examines school-based implementations, as
you mentioned the "neoliberal worldview via correct worker attitude."
This would be for a teacher - I'm assuming a student also - in order to
"promote classroom management as a way to build teamwork or steering
students towards self-regulation. These efforts worked together to
ultimately shape attitudes and dispositions towards a capitalist ethos."
Almost as if the schools are becoming embodiments of modern
corporations. Is that overstated?
Chomsky:
Well, you may know better than I do. I see the schools only from a
distance, but my feeling is, it's basically correct. I don't think
Duncan and those guys are saying, "Let's instill capitalist values." I
think what they want to do is instill discipline, obedience and
passivity. We're going to say this is what you have to know to repeat at
age 7, at age 10, at age 12. And if you can repeat those things, you go
on ahead. If a kid decides "I don't want to do that. I want to study
something else," you have to stop them.
Actually, I've talked to
teachers' groups occasionally and the reactions are interesting. I
remember not long ago I talked to a group of teachers. At the end, a
sixth-grade teacher came up just to talk to me and she told me of her
own experience in class. It was a little girl that came up after class
and said she was interested in something that came up. Could she have
some ideas as to how to pursue it? And the teacher had to tell her, "You
can't do it because you have to study for the MCAS. You have to pass
that exam that's coming." The teacher even said, "My salary depends on
it." So you're not going to get ahead if you do that. If you pursue your
own interest, you're not going to pass. And I happened to go to a
school when I was a kid and that's all we did, pursue our own interests.
It was kind of structured so you ended up knowing everything you were
supposed to know, arithmetic, Latin, whatever it was. But almost always
it was under your own initiative.
Falcone: A lot of this
is accompanied by a very strong emphasis on technology, and not
necessarily for liberating or creative impulses. It's technology that's
driving software managers or selling products and driving obedience
training. It makes education difficult.
Chomsky: Technologies can be liberating, but it can also be a tool of coercion and control.
Falcone: Can I ask you about "The Responsibility of Intellectuals"?
Your famous essay is nearing its 50th anniversary. In your opinion,
have the challenges associated with that essay shifted or remained
relatively the same?
Chomsky: I think
they're virtually identical. It's almost comical. I could give so many
examples. To pick one out, it doesn't make any sense. But this morning I
happened to read a Washington Post editorial which was about the
conference on building this great coalition to fight ISIS. Everybody
thought it was wonderful. They said there was one spoiler. The spoiler
was Iran and then it quoted a tweet by the Ayatollah Khomeini condemning
the conference. It also pointed out that Iran hadn't been invited to
the conference, but that couldn't be the reason why Iran was criticizing
it. It was because Iran was the spoiler.
That's typical of the
way intellectuals look at the world. You take the party line and you
internalize it and then you interpret everything in those terms with few
exceptions. In fact, there are probably more exceptions now than there
were in the '50s and '60s, but they're still pretty restrictive. A lot
of people who try to break out of the mold are just kicked out.
Saul
Isaacson: I have a media question. When I heard about the fall of
Mosul, to be honest, that was the first I've heard of ISIS and I follow
the mainstream media fairly closely.
Chomsky: Same here. It was a real surprise.
Isaacson: Why is that? Were there people who knew and were keeping it from us?
Chomsky:
First of all, when Iraq stopped being a US story, the press corps left.
If we're not involved, what's the difference? So, for example, the
worst crimes in the world right now in the last couple of years are
going on in Eastern Congo. There's almost nothing about them.
Isaacson: I've read nothing of it.
Chomsky:
Nothing, but maybe 5 million people have been killed in the last couple
of years. One reason we don't hear anything about it is because there's
very limited official US involvement of the press corps. The other
reason is that the story is not going to be palatable. Part of the
reason for the atrocities is so that you can have a device like a cell
phone. The multinationals are all over the place. They're ripping off
essential minerals. And the militias that are slaughtering everyone are
basically providing the mineral resources for multinationals that are
profiting off this kind of cheap access to resources and selling it to
you. That's not the kind of story you want to tell people.
So
there are several reasons why it's not covered. In the case of Mosul,
there was an official story. General [David] Petraeus, who is a military
genius, went to Mosul and pacified everything - was wonderful and he
left and became a big hero. Five minutes after he left, it all fell
apart because there was nothing going on. And as soon as he left, the
place fell apart with warring militias and so on. But that's not a good
story. It didn't fit with the party line at the moment. And since then,
that's been continuing. It's kind of ironic a US and Iranian-backed
government happens to be very brutal. It's been attacking the Sunni
minority quite viciously and nobody's paying attention. Then all of a
sudden, it turns out that you got this group ISIS, which had literally a
couple of thousand lightly-armed jihadis facing an Iraqi army of
350,000 people heavily armed, trained by the United States for 10 years.
The army, as soon as it looked at them, ran away and left their weapons
behind. What does that tell you about the attitude of Iraqis toward the
United States? It's not the kind of thing you report back. There are
people doing it, like Patrick Cockburn of the London Independent, but
he's almost alone.
Isaacson: Did it remind you of the army of South Vietnam? (ARVN)
Chomsky:
Yeah, it's kind of like that. You go back to the Vietnam War; it's kind
of interesting. The American military intelligence couldn't understand
what was happening. They said that our Vietnamese don't want to fight,
but their Vietnamese are 10 feet tall. They seemed to be supermen.
They're the same people. How can that be? But the obvious answer, of
course, doesn't occur. In fact, you can generalize this. Let's take
Southeast Asia. The last 20, 30 years has been what's called the "Asian
Miracle" - fast economic growth, industrial society. It's happening all
over, with one exception, which one? The Philippines is the one that
can't grow, which the US has been running for 100 years. Is there a
correlation? Have you read about it? It comes to mind, at least.
Falcone:
I remember you making the point about the iPads and the materials used
from the Congo and you made a comment that said something like, maybe
American taxpayers, if they had their choice between the brutal behavior
with transnational support or services, they might pick governmental
goods and services but they didn't have a choice.
Chomsky:
Go back to the '50s when I got here. I was in a research lab. In fact,
right down below this, there's a research lab for electronics. It was
100 percent funded by the Pentagon. What it was doing was creating the
modern IT technology culture in a high-tech economy on public funds: the
internet, computers, microelectronics. It was all coming out of public
funds. Thirty years later, it began to be profitable. Then it was handed
over to private enterprise.
The first marketable small computer
was Apple in 1977. That's after about 30 years of research and
development mainly in the state sector, places like this, of public
expense. In a capitalist system, there's a principle that if you invest,
especially in a long-term risky investment, if something comes out of
it, you're supposed to get the profit. It doesn't happen in our system.
The taxpayer paid for it and gets nothing - assumes all of the risk,
gets zero. The money goes into the pockets of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs,
who are ripping off decades of work in the public sector.
Now, go
back to your question and comment. Had the people in the 1950s had been
asked, "Do you want your taxes to go to development of the kind of
technology that will allow your grandchildren to have iPads or do you
want your taxes to go into a livable society? Health care, education,
places where people can have decent lives? And so on. What would people
have decided? Well, whatever the answer was, they didn't have an answer
because they never had a choice. They were told, "You have to pay taxes
for the Pentagon because the Russians are coming and the Chinese are
coming."
And it turns out that they were paying their taxes so
that their grandchildren could have an iPod and Steve Jobs could get
rich. Well, that's the way the whole society works, but you don't read
about that. Go back to "The Responsibility of Intellectuals." How often
do you read this? It's a glaring, obvious fact. You can find it. There
are a couple of people around the fringes who read about it. But it's
not the kind of thing that's presented to the public. The economics
department here - a good department - they don't even write about it.
They produce abstract models of free markets, which have very limited
relation to the reality right under their nose.
Falcone: Thank you very much for your time.
Isaacson: Thank you. It was fascinating as always.
Dan Falcone is an educator
with more than 10 years of experience in both the public and private
setting. Saul Isaacson studied at Columbia University and The University
of Pennsylvania. He has taught English at Trinity School in New York
for over two decades.
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