Full edited transcript of “A Conversation with Noam Chomsky” conducted at MIT on March 24, 2015 – Michael Galli’s Media and Self class at Rivendell Academy. Interview questions asked by Tali Gelenian, Jennifer DuBois, Quenla Haehnal, Emily Ghio, Katana Labadie, Alex Rand, and Michael Galli. Tali: So I am asking the first question. In your books and in class we discussed “the bewildered herd” and how most people don’t really participate in government or democracy. What would be different in a participatory democracy if the bewildered herd had voice? Chomsky: Remember that the phrase “bewildered herd” is prescriptive, what Walter Lipmann thinks the people ought to be. Doesn’t mean they are that. In fact we know quite a lot about it. The United States is a very heavily polled society, so there’s tons of evidence about peoples’ attitudes and some of the main topics in academic political science -‐ mainstream -‐ are to compare public attitudes with public policy -‐ which is essentially a measure of democracy. The conclusions are that we have absolutely nothing resembling a democracy. About 70% of the population, the lowest 70% on the income scale, their representatives pay absolutely no attention to their opinions so they are disenfranchised. As you move up the scale, there’s a little more influence but not much. But when you get to the very top, which is like a fraction of 1%, that’s basically where the policy is made. So we live in a plutocracy which is pretending to be a democracy, which is pretty much the way the theorists that are quoted there [in the book Media Control] think things ought to be. Like Walter Lipmann, who is a liberal, would not agree that the decision makers should be drawn from the super wealthy and the corporate
elite. He thought, like most intellectuals, that they ought to be drawn from people like himself whom he considered to be the “intelligent minority” who ought to set policy, but they don’t have power. They may be delegated to do some jobs, but not beyond that. If you look at the actual attitudes, you find that the bewildered herd is not bewildered. There are very consistent attitudes and they’re pretty much to the sort of progressive side of even the Democratic Party. So, for example, on things like, say global warming, major issue, the public is in favor of much stronger action. If you look at say international affairs, the public generally is in favor of letting the United Nations take the lead in international crises, not the US. Views like that are so remote from elite opinion that they can’t even be articulated. Some of the most interesting results are studies, you can find them in political science journals, careful studies of sectors of the population that regard themselves as very conservative, you know, “get the government off our back; we don’t want anything to do with the government.” If you look at the attitudes of people in those groups, they are pretty much social democratic. They’re in favor of more spending for health, for education, for infrastructure, for the environment, “but get the government off our back,” and quite generally I think the conclusion is that the “herd” pretty much knows what it wants, but what it wants is not what concentrated power wants so they are disregarded. It’s not uniform, but it’s consistent over quite a large range. Alex: Another question. If public education were not an indoctrination system, what do you think it would look like?
Chomsky: What public education ought to be is basically encouraging individual effort to challenge, to create, to explore. Go back a couple hundred years, Enlightenment, there were two models that were proposed for education, one not favored, the other favored. The one that was not favored, the image that was used was pouring a liquid into a vessel. So you pour information into the student, or alleged information, and the student regurgitates it. That’s the model that was disparaged, but of course it’s the model that actually exists. The other model, the image that was used was spreading a thread along which the student follows in his or her own way. Meaning there’s some structure that the individual student should be encouraged to discover how to pursue the challenges, the questions, the issues that arise within that structure. The idea is to learn how to learn, not to learn information that you can then pour out. That’s what good education ought to be, and sometimes is, like I imagine this class is [student laughter]. But all too often it’s pouring water into a vessel, and as we all know it’s a pretty leaky vessel. So you can memorize for the exam, get an A, and a week later you forgot what the course was about. Emily: My question. In the class, I struggle a lot with what I should do to contribute to society and not be a part of the “bewildered herd.” So my question is given what we have looked in class, media and power, I feel overwhelmed in regards to my place in society. I struggle with where and how to use my voice. Do you have any thoughts on this? Chomsky: I get a ton of email, at least ten letters a day, that say that, basically. And it’s pretty natural. In a sense we’re all in that position. You take a look around. The problems that we
should be considering are often overwhelming, ranges from personal problems, problems of personal life, to literally problems of survival. This, your generation, is unique in human history in that the decisions you make will determine whether organized society persists. It may not. We’re just facing too many dangers. And there has never been a time in human history when questions like that arose. And then there is a whole range of others, like the last 30 years have been a real attack on the population, real wages have stagnated, productivity and economic growth continues but for the general population, it’s basically flat. So, for example, real wages for mill workers are about what they were in the 60s. The minimum wage is about half of what it should be if it had continued to follow economic growth as it did in the 50s and 60s. If you drive around Boston, you can’t. Everywhere you go there’s a detour because they are trying to patch up some piece of the road. Same with every other city. The bridges are falling apart. And when you come back from Europe to the United States as I’ve done recently, you think you are coming to a third world society; everything is falling apart. The educational system is declining significantly, including higher education, in comparison with other countries. For the wealthy, of course, it’s fantastic. You’ve got the Caribbean Islands, the jet planes and so on. But for the general population, it’s been a period of kind of stagnation or decline. And in fact, if you look around the country, there is a kind of interesting commentary on the country which isn’t discussed much. There’s a ton of work to do. Everywhere you look there’s work that has to be done from schools to health to infrastructure, everywhere. There’s a huge number of people who want to work, way more than the employment statistics indicate because plenty of people have just dropped out of the
workforce. If you look at the ratio of people roughly from the 25 – 50, the demographic range where most people are working, it’s declined. The number working or even seeking work has declined. So a lot of work to be done, plenty of people who want to do it. Huge resources; it’s the richest country in the world, comparable advantages. The system is so rotten it can’t put those three things together. The problems of that kind, in fact, everywhere you look, there are really serious problems so it feels overwhelming, and it should. But that doesn’t mean you have to abandon any effort to do anything. You have to find out what is your place in this mass of questions, problems, opportunities; plenty of opportunities, and especially at your age it’s good to feel overwhelmed. You’re thinking about what there is. There are paths to follow; you’ve got to find them. Quenla: I guess I’m next. In our class we’ve mostly read your political analysis work, but my question is; you’ve done so much work in linguistics, and philosophy, and political analysis, looking back, which of the three disciplines do you feel has empowered you the most to contribute to humanity? Chomsky: If the world would go away [student laughter], I would be perfectly happy to work in linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science. These are domains that have significant intellectual depth and intellectual challenges. The study of the media is important but it’s actually pretty easy; you can do it in your spare time. The study of international affairs, you have to pay attention to what’s going on, but there’s nothing deep about it. There’s no theoretical principles. It’s not like studying the sciences where there’s explanatory principles, there’s
interpreting complicated empirical evidence and so on. It’s important, but it’s not intellectually very challenging. So, if the world would go away, I would just as soon keep to those intellectual challenges. But the world won’t go away so you have to balance what’s interesting and what’s important. Quenla: Yea, I guess I do think that the media and all the problems that we are having like international relations and all that… do you think it’s almost distracting us from the work that we could be doing like, you know, cognitive science … like we could be progressing so much more but are distracted by not getting along with each other? Chomsky: Well the problems of the world are just objective. It’s kind of like you can’t pretend they’re not there. So people have to make choices. If you walk down the halls of MIT, you will find people, plenty of them, who are working 70 hours a week on some technical problem and paying no attention to the world, and you can find others who are engaged. But those are choices you make. There’s no, I mean, it’s a moral issue. If you have people like you and me, we have a lot of privilege otherwise we wouldn’t be sitting here. If you have privilege, you have opportunities. The more you have privilege, the more opportunities you have. The more opportunities you have, the more responsibility you have, and then comes the question; do I want to undertake the responsibilities that I have. Now, it’s kinda like say having a family, raising children. You could say, well I don’t care, just let them run around all day, don’t pay attention to them because actually I want to see a movie or you can take responsibility for them. But that’s a choice that you make. The world is kinda like your children, in fact, that’s
not a bad image. Now, whether the next generation will have a relatively decent chance for survival depends on choices that your generation is going to have to make. I mean if things go on the way they are going, as can read in the press regularly, the city of Boston might be under water in a couple of generations. Jen: So my question for you is, in your book you talk about how the political elite and economic elite influence society. Which age group do you believe holds the most influential power in our society if all the age groups had a voice? Chomsky: Well, our society is basically, to a pretty unusual extent, a business run society. I mean it’s true of most of the world, but it’s true to an extreme extent in the United States. So, you can see that in all sorts of ways. Take something like say healthcare. Almost every country, developed country, has some kind of national health care system. In the United States the population has wanted that for years, but it can’t get it. The United States has pretty much a privatized system which is hopelessly inefficient, extremely bureaucratic, very costly. Actually the government of the United States spends about as much on health care as other industrialized societies, but that’s only half the costs here because US health care is about twice as expensive per capita as other countries and the results are pretty poor… infant mortality and other measures. Well, that’s typical of the whole society. There’s a very weak labor movement as compared with other countries. Voting is pretty low in the United States and the analyses of voting have shown that the demography of the people who don’t vote, you know, who they are, is approximately the same as those who in European countries vote
for one of the moderately left parties. But since they don’t exist here, people aren’t going to vote. And many other measures show that the extent to which the concentrated wealth of the corporate sector and the super rich is overwhelmingly influential to policy. There have been some careful studies done, like this guy William Donhoff whose written books in which he tries to trace in some detail the backgrounds and the economic role, social role, of people who are in top decision making positions and that kind of spells out the details, but the facts are pretty obvious and a lot of things follow from it. Incidentally, this group that I was talking to is a group that’s very much worth following up, F.A.I.R – Fairness in Accuracy and Reporting. You can find them in the internet. They do very careful and very insightful media analysis. Emily: We visited their office … Chomsky: Oh, you did? Emily: Two weeks ago. Katana: My question is mainly focused on your book. I noticed that there are two sections. You wrote your original section and then The Journalist from Mars. I was reading through it and I understand that it’s kind of like a hypothetical scenario. I struggled with understanding that section. Could you like elaborate your ideas on that? Chomsky: It’s an attempt to say what real journalism would be if it was not constrained by the factors that distort journalism into a particular direction because of the nature of the institutions. Take the American media, major American media; say CBS News or the New York Times. Pick the one you want. Every one of them is a big corporation, usually parts of mega-‐
corporations. Like other businesses, they have a product and a market. The market is advertisers, that what supports them, that’s their income, comes from advertising. But the product that they sell is you. The product is audiences. So these are businesses that are selling audiences to other businesses. If you take a look at the elite media, the ones that more or less set the agenda for others, like the New York Times, what is the product that they sell? Its elite audiences. Like most people don’t read the New York Times. The people who read the New York Times are what are sometimes called the political class, you know, maybe the more educated, the more influential, the ones who like to think of themselves as the intelligent minority; the ones who are district managers, business managers, political managers, others. So, you have institutions. You have a major corporation selling elite audiences to other corporations. Well, common sense alone leads you to expect what the media product is going to be. It’s something that’s going to answer to the interests and concerns of the sellers, the buyers and the product. And the New York Times, for example, does set the agenda for other newspapers. If you go to a newspaper in, I don’t know, Akron, Ohio, or anywhere you like, you’ll find that what they do is in the afternoon the editors get together. The New York Times every afternoon around 4:00 sends out over the wires an account of what the New York Times is going to have on its front page the next day, what are the news stories, and that’s the one that the newspaper in Akron, Ohio pick up. In fact, by now even the Boston Globe, a big newspaper, has almost no independent reporting. Take a look at this morning’s paper and you’ll see virtually everything comes from the New York Times or the Associated Press, which does the same thing. Maybe sometimes they’ll pick up something from the Washington Post
which works just like the New York Times. So what you have is agenda setting throughout the country. The other journalists either don’t have the resources or they don’t have the interest in trying to be independent journalists. Now that’s not entirely true. So in Akron, Ohio, they may have a really good story on corruption in the police force, that is local reporting, but the general things that matter are just picked up from these corporations that are selling elite audiences to other corporations. Well that’s the way the journalistic picture is. The Journalist from Mars would try to be an independent journalist. And the talk was an effort to say; well, what would you find if you were an independent journalist not subject to these pressures? And I think it’s quite different from the picture that’s presented. So, this happens to be about the “War on Terror,” and notice it opens by saying that the standard story is that the “War on Terror” was declared by George W Bush after 9-‐11, which is just not true. It was re-‐declared by Bush and that’s quite crucial. When Ronald Reagan came into office 20 years earlier, he immediately declared a “War on Terror.” Now that was going to be the prime focus of US foreign policy; no more human rights, now it’s “War on Terror.” Now that’s disappeared from view for a very good reason. The “War on Terror” turned into a massive atrocity, killed hundreds of thousands of people in Central America, was supporting South African apartheid, probably killed a couple million people in Southern Africa, supported atrocities in the Middle East, and that’s not the right kind of story. You didn’t want to say that the “War on Terror” was actually a major terrorist war. So that’s out of history. You don’t study it in school, it’s not reported in the newspapers, it’s essentially erased from history. So, when George W Bush re-‐ declared the “War on Terror,” that’s declaring the war, the other war is gone. What’s the
current “War on Terror?” Same as the first “War on Terror.” Major atrocities and crimes all over the world, has nothing to do with terror. In fact, if you take a look at the time when he declared the “War on Terror,” terrorism, what we call terrorism; you know, what other people do, we don’t call our own atrocities terrorism, it was confined to a little area in Northwest Afghanistan, up in the hills, Al Qaeda, a little tiny group. Take a look at today, all over the world, West Africa, in Yemen, Southern Asia, there’s huge terrorist system. That’s the result of the “War on Terror;” it’s a terror generating device and it does it by massive terror. So Obama’s drone campaign is the most extreme terrorist campaign in human history. I mean, if any other country was doing that we’d nuke them. What we’re doing, regularly, is the President and his advisors get together Tuesday morning and they decide who they’re going to murder today, and the people they’re murdering are people who are suspected, suspected of maybe someday wanting to hurt us. Suppose Iran was doing that; going around the world killing people who they think might someday want to harm them. I mean, we’d regard it as a return to the Nazis. When we do it, it’s normal. Take right now Yemen, one of the centers of drone activities. If you look, you can find out what those drone strikes are doing in Yemen. Occasionally it even makes the newspapers. Usually not here, but maybe in England or something. So, for example, recently in the London Guardian, a pretty independent newspaper, there was a report about a 14 year-‐old Yemini boy who was killed in a drone strike. And the reason they picked him out is because about a month earlier they had interviewed him and he described how his entire family had been killed in drone strikes. His father was killed while he was working the fields, his brother was killed, his uncle was killed.
And he said, we all just live in terror. We don’t know when the next attack’s going to come. That’s the way to generate terrorists, and in fact you can see it. That’s happened in the past 15 years. Our terror, which is massive, has gone on all over the place, getting worse and worse, and its generating terrorism in response. That’s the way you would describe the “War on Terror,” the way you would have described the first Reagan “War on Terror.” But that’s not the way it’s described in the press. The Journalist from Mars would describe it that way, and in fact you can figure it out yourself. These are not obscure facts, this isn’t quantum physics, it’s all right on the surface. All you have to do is look with an open eye. That was the point of the talk. Katana: Ok, thank you. Emily: We did research on a boy from America named Abdulrahman al-‐Awlaki whose dad was a suspected terrorist. He was from America and his dad was in Yemen killed for suspected terror… Chomsky: Killed by a drone strike? Emily: Yes, and his son who is 16 was killed over there in a separate drone strike. Chomsky: He was an American? Emily: Yes. They were both killed by drone strikes and Obama wasn’t able to give a reason why the 16 year-‐old was killed.
Chomsky: Well most of the time they don’t have a reason. It’s not a secret; they say that they are killing suspects. There used to be a principle. It goes back 800 years to the Magna Carta that a person is innocent until proven guilty. It’s called presumption of innocence. So you are innocent until proven guilty in a fair trial, but these people are suspects. They haven’t been proven guilty. And even if they were, who appointed us executioner? Alex: We studied Abdulrahman al-‐Awlaki because we wanted to really understand what makes a person worthy or unworthy of being in the news. For instance, we also studied Malala Yousafzai. What do you think makes somebody worthy or unworthy? Chomsky: My friend Edward Herman, who I’ve co-‐authored several books with on propaganda, he once made a distinction between what he called worthy victims and unworthy victims. Worthy victims are people who are killed by somebody else. Unworthy victims are people who are killed by us. Malala was, didn’t have to be killed but she was tortured by enemies so she is a worthy victim, so she is all over the place. This 14 year-‐old kid who we murdered in a drone strike, he is an unworthy victim so he’ll never be featured anywhere. And that generalizes. Compare say … take the term dissident. It is an interesting word. The term dissident, if you look at its dictionary definition, it’s somebody who’s challenging authoritarian, usually, government policy. But that’s not the way we use the term. If you take look back at that picture there [a painting Archbishop Oscar Romero and six Jesuit Priests], that’s a picture of unworthy victims; 6 leading Latin American intellectuals who were assassinated by a U.S. run Salvadorian elite battalion which had killed thousands of people, and the Archbishop who was murdered by essentially the same hands. So it’s the murder of an Archbishop and 6
leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, who are unworthy victims, apparently no one ever heard of them. If that had happened in Eastern Europe, they would be worthy victims. They’re not called dissidents; the only people who are called dissidents are East Europeans. The term means Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Havel ….they are dissidents because they were standing against a the brutal authoritarian state that was our enemy. If people are standing up against even more brutal and authoritarian states, mass murder who we support, they’re not dissidents. In fact, they don’t even exist. [Points to Romero painting] Now, you might ask how many people would be able to even identify who those people are. Actually that painting was given to me by a Jesuit priest 20 years ago and just kind of as an experiment when people come in from all over the world for interviews I often ask them if they know what it is. If it’s Americans, almost nobody knows what it is. If it’s Latin Americans, everybody knows what it is. If it’s Europeans, maybe 20% might know what it is. If it had happen say in Czechoslovakia, instead of El Salvador, not only would you know who it is, but you would be praising these major heroes, statues and so forth. That’s worthy and unworthy victims. And it generalizes very broadly. In fact, take 9-‐11, if you ask people what do you mean by 9-‐11, they say September 11, 2001. Actually, that’s the second 9-‐11. If you ask Latin Americans, they might call it the second 9-‐11. There was an earlier one, September 11th, 1973 which actually was much worse. That was the day in which US backed military forces overthrew the government of Chile. They immediately murdered thousands of people, tortured tens of thousands, destroyed the government, you know, instituted a very brutal regime which lasted for decades. Its effects are still not gone. The effects of that 9-‐11 were much worse than the
one here, but it’s not part of history. Those are unworthy victims and everywhere you look, you’ll find it. Take the last Israeli attack on Gaza last summer. A couple thousand Palestinians were murdered. They’re unworthy victims. Three Jews were killed, Israelis. They’re worthy victims. They can run a legal suit in a court here against Palestinian authorities. They’re the ones who are featured in the press, when you see people mourning and so on and so forth. Emily: What do you think, if we stopped our terror on others, what do you think the effect would be with other countries? Chomsky: Other countries? They’d have the chance to pursue their own course. Take say, Cuba. Recently Obama made some steps, minor steps, towards normalizing relations with Cuba. They’re quite minor steps. The way it’s depicted here, in fact, the way he described it and the way commentators described it, if you read his speech, which was echoed in the press, he said; ‘for decades we’ve been pursuing our efforts to bring democracy and human rights to Cuba. It hasn’t worked, so we will therefore try another method.’ Go to any Latin American country and ask them, what’s going on in Cuba? And they’ll tell you what’s, in fact, the case; that for 50 years, the United States first carried out a massive terrorist attack against Cuba beginning with the Kennedy administration which was the worst. Major terrorism. Here they talk about maybe trying to assassinate Castro, that was a tiny part of it, of blowing up petrochemical plants, biological warfare, attacking hotels, sinking ships, you know, major war. That’s along with economic strangulation for a small country on the periphery of the United States, and the blockade, which is what it amounts to, was very severe. I mean that if, for
example, a Swedish company producing medical equipment has some Cuban nickel, they can be punished by US law. It’s a very severe law so that the way of translating Obama’s speech into English would be: For 50 years we’ve been carrying out massive terrorism and economic strangulation against Cuba to try to overthrow the regime and return it to the norm, of you know, El Salvador and Honduras and so on, and we failed. So let’s try another way to destroy Cuba. That would be the actual way of saying it and if you think people don’t know, you’re wrong. The main reason why Obama made those slight steps is that the US is now so isolated that it’s barely even admitted into Hemispheric Conferences. The last Hemispheric Conference, a couple of years ago in Columbia, broke down because the United States and Canada refused to accept the consensus view on every other issue. And, in fact, there’s another conference coming up called The Summit of the Americas, and the US is concerned that it may not even be allowed to attend. And that’s the reason, surely, that’s the reason for these slight normalization steps. That’s what the press would report if it’s The Journalist from Mars, but it’s the exact opposite of the picture here. So what would other countries be like? Well, what would Cuba be like if it hadn’t been subjected to massive terrorism and economic strangulation? We don’t know, but you can guess. There’s more to this story which I suspect you haven’t studied or read about. Take South Africa. Everyone knows about the terrible South African regime, apartheid and finally it ended and so on. What isn’t known is that the United States was the last strong supporter of apartheid. Reagan himself was a strong supporter of the apartheid regime; in fact, he denied that it was happening. He said it’s a tribal war, you know, the Zulus, the Bantas, the Whites and so on, there’s no apartheid. And
after every other country had backed away from supporting it, Reagan was still supporting it. What overthrew apartheid was Cuba. South Africa sent military forces to invade the surrounding countries, Angola, Mozambique and others, with the support of the United States. Cuba sent military forces, incidentally black soldiers which was critical psychologically, and they drove the South Africans out of Angola. They forced them to abandon Namibia which they were hold illegally in violation of UN orders, and they made it very clear to the South Africans that they were not going to be able to maintain their system. And they abandoned apartheid. And they know it. When Nelson Mandela was let out of jail, the first thing he did was to go to Havana to thank the Cubans for liberating South Africa. Meanwhile the U.S. was supporting apartheid. That’s the actual story, but you’re going to have to look pretty hard to find it. You can find it in scholarship. If you really did the research, you can find it but Michael: I have a couple of questions. I have been following high stakes testing throughout my career. I have been writing about it, against it, which at times is troubling. The first time I started speaking out against it I wasn’t tenured and my principal put his arm around me and said, ‘I need you to keep your mouth shut until you are tenured.’ With this latest round being the Common Core, and these kids just started the testing literally yesterday, one history is a White Paper that was released in 2007 called “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” a title taken from Winston Churchill’s history of the rise of the Nazi state. It was commissioned by the National Academies and was written by about a chair of 12 people, but one was Norman Augustine, retired chairman of Lockheed Martin Corporation, one of the world’s leading weapons manufacturers, Lee Raymond from of Exxon, at the time the world’s largest, most
profitable corporation, and then Robert Gates who was former CIA Director and soon to be the Defense Secretary, so the leader of the world’s foremost army. It harkened back to 1983’s “A Nation at Risk”. Its rhetoric is that public education is a failure and this poses a national security threat, and we are going to lose our ability to maintain our, and this is their quote, ‘pre-‐eminence, our economic pre-‐eminence.’ This paper lead directly, by the way, to the passage of The America Competes Act which required longitudinal data systems which are now uniform across the nation and can share data connecting every public teacher to each student. That Common Core is a response to a “national security threat” doesn’t get any traction. The people aren’t talking about that. The press aren’t talking about that. Yet, to me, there’s a clear link at the top levels of government that we need to reform education to maintain our “privileged position” in the world. I was wondering if you could speak to that. Chomsky: Well, actually, it’s kind of interesting to compare that with what’s been happening since 1983. The effect of the Reaganite policies has been to undermine the U.S. position relative to other countries in educational attainment. At that time the U.S. was first in the world by almost every measure; number of students in college, number of students who graduated and so on. Now I think we’re down to about 12th or 15th, even below Poland and certainly below Germany, Finland, many others, and there’s a reason. They have undermined higher education and general education. The higher education system has been stratified. It’s now a two tiered system where, for the wealthy you can pay the cost -‐ the inflation of education has gone way up. Public education has severely declined. The funding of public education has simply declined. That’s part of the whole neo-‐liberal policies. Turn everything
over to a private power. So they have succeeded in undermining the American educational system. They’re now doing it even further with ‘No Child Left Behind’ and so on, which is a sure way to guarantee that the children will not learn anything. I mean, if you have to spend your time studying for the next, here it’s the MCAS exam, you’re not learning anything. I mean, I’ve talked to teachers’ groups and you hear the stories, I’m sure you know it. Recently I was talking to a sixth grade teacher who told me that after class a girl came up to her and said she’s really interested in something that came up, and could she have some suggestion as to how to pursue it, and the teacher had to tell her; you can’t do it because you have to study for this exam. So you have to memorize a lot of stuff that you’ll repeat and then forget. That’s what you have to do. It’s a way to turn the kids into automata, disciplined, good for the military, maybe they will make it to the Marine Corps, and they’ll do the jobs they’re supposed to do. For the elite the training is quite different. If you go to a good private high school, or Harvard, MIT, education isn’t like that at all. A class here does not consist of a lecturer telling ‘this is what you’ve got to memorize and turn in for your exam’. A course would be ‘here is what I think about Biology, tell me why I am wrong’, and things like that. That’s what education ought to be but, and it is for the elite, tiny elite, Augustine, those are the guys who work for him. But for the general population, the idea is to turn them into passive, obedient, marginalized people who will spend their time in shopping malls. That’s the goal and the effect of the educational reforms. There’s some good work on this. Did you read Suzanne Mettler’s recent book? Michael: I didn’t. I follow Diane Ravitch quite a bit.
Chomsky: Yes, her work has been good. There’s another one that just came out recently by a sociologist, I think at Cornell, Suzanne Mettler, it’s called “Degrees of Inequality,” that’s a pretty good analysis of what’s been done. Incidentally, if I might just add a personal note. I was lucky, I went to a Deweyite school, an experimental school run by Temple University and on Deweyite lines. I didn’t know I was a good student until I got to high school. I went to an academic high school, you know, the usual kind, where you train kids to go to college and so on. But I knew I had skipped a grade but nobody paid any attention to that, just that I was the smallest kid in the class. The idea that somebody was a good student just didn’t arise. That they were not a good student also didn’t arise. You did your best; you worked together and so on. When my kids went to school in Lexington, by third grade they were already dividing the kids into smart and dumb. This kid’s dumb and he’s lower track, this kid’s smart… I mean, it’s grotesque. Michael: So, on a different topic. I know how you feel about cult of personality. I have followed your work for years and people tend to want to look to a savior, you know, instead of going out and being empowered themselves to take action. And I know that you haven’t embraced that, and I know at times you get mobbed at lectures and all that. When I started teaching, I made a poster of you. It cost six bucks [Chomsky laughs]. It’s been on my wall, I’ve carried it around from room to room and I have a quote … Chomsky: and People threw darts at it… [student laughter]
Michael: No, when I first started teaching nobody knew who it was. But the quote that I chose is, “States are not moral agents, people are; and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions,” which I like. In fact, incidentally, there was a young group of college students that came to visit my class, they were opera students, this is years ago, and they were traveling around the country and they sang in my class. They were like 20 some odd years old and one of them came up to me and said, you know, he knew who you were, he said; ‘I had a friend who had a Noam Chomsky poster up and he lost his job.’ Chomsky: They can get fired. I’ve heard plenty of stories like this… [student laughter] Michael: So, anyway, my question is; I’ve been fascinated by your poster of Bertrand Russell, which I know that you’ve had in your offices for years. Is this because he serves as a reminder, an inspiration to you? Chomsky: He is one of the people who I do respect, intellectuals who I do respect. He went to jail for opposing the First World War. He couldn’t get appointed at City College because he was too independent. He was a great and very important thinker. He did important work in Logic, Philosophy and so on, but he also had a high level of integrity. When he was in his 80s, he was out there demonstrating against nuclear weapons. On the other hand, I also like that picture which I just showed the kids [points to painting]. Michael: Is that Romero?
Chomsky: That’s Archbishop Romero and the six assassinated Jesuit priests, Latin American intellectuals, and that’s another kind of inspiration. These are people who not only were very courageous and independent, who were assassinated for that reason. Michael: But in your personal life, you draw inspiration from the likes of these folks? Chomsky: I wouldn’t say that….. The people I draw inspiration from are… actually my friend Howard Zinn put it very nicely, he said that the really important people are those countless unknown people whose actions lay the basis for the events that enter history and when you meet them around the world, they are in prison. Michael: and who are not written about usually….. unsung heroes. Chomsky: You never heard of ……. Take say the Civil Rights Movement, which was important. Everybody knows Martin Luther King, who was a significant, important, honorable person, but he would have been the first to say that he was riding a wave. It was created by others whose names that you don’t know. Michael: High School students. Chomsky: Yea, students who were going around the south, riding freedom busses, getting killed and so on, they laid the basis for him. Michael: My last question is; who do you see in the next generation coming up doing your type of work? I mean, I know what Amy Goodman does, Jeremy Scahill, and I know Glenn Greenwald is doing a lot of work but who ….
Chomsky: Naomi Klein, there’s plenty of people. Michael: Is there one in particular who you feel, I don’t know, is following in your footsteps? Chomsky: No, I don’t have any footsteps [student laughter]. I am following other people ….. But there’s plenty of young people around doing really important work. As usual, most of them aren’t known, but that’s always the case. [End]
