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GAMSAT Section II - Education

Noam Chomsky - The Purpose of Education

Noam Chomsky discusses the purpose of education, impact of technology, whether education should
be perceived as a cost or an investment and the value of standardised assessment.

Purpose of education

The Enlightenment has sparked the idea that the highest goal in life is to inquire and create, to strive
for a scientific understanding of how and why things are. The purpose of education from that point
of view is to help people determine how to learn on their own. The learner would be the master of
their own fate – they themselves are to determine how they were to use the konwledge they have
gained. That was one concept of education.

Yet, as the industrial revolution came to sweep over the world, another concept of education took
the forefront. The other concept was essentially indoctrination. From childhood, young people were
placed into a school, in which they were taught to follow orders, accept existing frameworks, and
not to challenge the authority of teachers. The schooling systems were then geared towards more
control, more indoctrination, more vocational training. These strict rules imposing a debt which
traps students, young people, into a life of conformity. Children were

While changes to the schooling system has been made and progress achieved, have been

That’s the exact opposite of the traditions that comes out of the Enlightenment. There is a constant
struggle between those, in the colleges, in the schools. In schools, do you train for passing tests or
do you train for creative inquiry, pursuing interests that are aroused by material that is presented
and that you want to pursue either on your own or in cooperation with others? And this goes all the
way through up to graduate school and research. It’s just two different ways of looking at the world.

While at the graduate level, education, at last in the more democratic world, essentially follows the
Enlightenment tradition. in fact, science couldn’t progress unless it was based on inculcation of the
urge to challenge, to question doctrine, question authority, the search for alternatives, use your
imagination. That’s my view of what an educational system should be like, down to kindergarten.

Yet, there certainly are powerful structures in the society which would prefer people to be
indoctrinated, conform, not ask too many questions, be obedient, fulfill the roles that are assigned
to you, and don’t try to shake systems of power and authority.

Those are choices we have to make, either as people, wherever we stand in the educational system
—as students, as teachers, as people in the outside trying to help shape it in the directions we think
it ought to go.
GAMSAT Section II - Education

Impact of technology

The recent decades have seen substantial growth in new technology—technology of


communication, information, access, interchange. Technology is neutral. It’s like a hammer; the
hammer doesn’t care whether you use it to build a house or whether a torturer uses it to crush
somebody’s skull. A hammer can do either. Same with the modern technology, say, the internet.

The internet is extremely valuable if you know what you’re looking for. I use it all the time for
research; I’m sure everyone does. If you know what you’re looking for, you have a kind of a
framework of understanding which directs you to particular things and lets you sideline lots of
others, then this can be a very valuable tool.

You can’t expect somebody to become a biologist by giving them access to the Harvard University
biology library and say just, Look through it. That will give them nothing. And the internet is the
same except magnified enormously.

If you don’t understand or know what you’re looking for, if you don’t have some kind of a
conception of what matters—always of course with the proviso that you’re willing to question it if it
seems to be going in the wrong direction—if you don’t have that, exploring the internet is just
picking out random factoids that don’t mean anything.

So, behind any significant use of contemporary technology—the internet, communication systems,
graphics, whatever it may be—unless behind it is some well-constructed, directive, conceptual
apparatus, it is very unlikely to be helpful, it may turn out to be harmful. For example, a random
exploration through the internet turns out to be a cult generator—you pick out a factoid here and a
factoid there, and somebody else reinforces it, and all of a sudden you have some crazed picture
which has some factual basis but nothing to do with the world. You have to know how to evaluate,
interpret, and understand.

In, say, biology again, the person who wins the Nobel Prize in biology is not the person who read the
most journal articles and took the most notes on them; it’s the person who most knew what to look
for.

Cultivating that capacity to seek what’s significant, always willing to question whether you’re on the
right track, that’s what education is going to be about, whether it’s using computers and the internet
or pencil and paper and books.
GAMSAT Section II - Education

Cost or investment

Education is discussed in terms of whether it’s a worthwhile investment, and does it create human
capital that can be used for economic growth and so on. That’s a very strange, a kind of a very
distorting way to even pose the question, I think. Do we want to have a society of free, creative,
independent individuals, able to appreciate and gain from the cultural achievements of the past and
to add to them? Do we want that, or do we want people who can increase GDP? They’re not
necessarily the same, they’re not the same thing. And an education of the kind that, say, Bertrand
Russell, John Dewey, and others talked about—that’s a value in itself. Whatever impact it has on
society, it’s a value because it helps create better human beings. After all, that’s what an educational
system should be for.

On the other hand, if you want to look at it in terms of costs and benefits, take the new technology
that we were just talking about, where’d that come from? Well, actually, a lot of it was developed
right where we’re sitting. Down below where we now are was a major laboratory back in the 1950s,
where I was employed in fact, which had lots of scientists, engineers, people of all kinds of interests,
philosophers, others, who were working on developing the basic character of the, and even the basic
tools of the technology that is now common. Computers and the internet, for example, were pretty
much in the public sector for decades, funded in places like this, where people were exploring new
possibilities that were mostly unthought of, unheard of at the time. Some of them worked, some
didn’t. The ones that worked were finally converted into tools that people can use.

That’s the way scientific progress takes place; it’s the way cultural progress takes place generally.
Classical artists, for example, came out of a tradition of craftsmanship that was developed over long
periods with master artisans, with others, and sometimes you can rise on their shoulders and create
new marvelous things. But it doesn’t come from nowhere. If there isn’t a lively cultural and
educational system which is geared towards encouraging creative exploration, independence of
thought, willingness to cross frontiers, to challenge accepted beliefs and so on—if you don’t have
that, you’re not going to get the technology that can lead to economic gains, though that, I don’t
think, is the prime purpose of cultural enrichment and education as part of it.

Assessment v. autonomy

There is, in the recent period particularly, an increasing shaping of education from the early ages on,
towards passing examinations. That can be—taking tests can be of some use, both for the person
who’s taking the test, to see what I know and where I am and what I haven’t, and for instructors,
what should be changed and improved in developing the course of instruction. But beyond that,
they don’t really tell you very much. I mean, I know for many many years, I was on, I’ve been on
admissions committees for entry into an advanced graduate program, maybe one of the most
advanced anywhere, and we of course pay some attention to test results, but really not too much. I
mean, a person can do magnificently on every test and understand very little. All of us who’ve been
through schools and colleges and universities are very familiar with this. You can be assigned—you
can be in some course you have no interest in, and there’s demand that you pass a test, and you can
study hard for the test, and you can ace it, to use the idiom, do fine, and a couple of weeks later you
forgot what the topic was. I’m sure we’ve all had that experience; I know I have.

It can be a useful device if it contributes to the constructive purposes of education. If it’s just a set of
hurdles you have to cross, it can turn out to be not only meaningless, but it can divert you away from
things you ought to be doing. Actually, I see this regularly when I talk to teachers. Just to give you
GAMSAT Section II - Education

one experience from a couple of weeks ago, there’s plenty like it, I happened to be talking to a group
which included many schoolteachers. One of them was a sixth-grade teacher, teaches kids that are
ten or eleven, eleven or twelve, something like that. She came up to me afterwards, and I’d been
talking about these things, and she told me of an experience that she had just had in her class. After
one of the classes, a little girl came up to her and said she was really interested in something that
came up and she asked how she could—could the teacher give her some ideas about how to look
into it further. And the teacher was compelled to tell her, I’m sorry, but you can’t do that, you have
to study to pass this national exam that’s coming. That’s going to determine your future—the
teacher didn’t say it, but that’s going to determine my future, like whether I’m rehired and so on.
The system is geared toward getting the children to pass hurdles, but not to learn and understand
and explore. Now, that child would have been better off if she had been allowed to explore what she
was interested in, and maybe not do so well on the test about things she wasn’t interested in, and
that will come along when they fit into her interests and concerns.

And so a test—I don’t say that tests should be eliminated; they can be a useful educational tool, but
ancillary, something that’s just helping improve, for ourselves, for instructor, and others, what we’re
doing, and tell us where we ought to be moving. But passing tests doesn’t begin to compare with
searching and inquiring and pursuing topics that engage us and excite us; that’s far more significant
than passing tests. And in fact if that’s the kind of educational career that you’re given the
opportunity to pursue, you will remember what you discovered. There’s a famous physicist, a world-
famous physicist, right here at MIT, who, like a lot of the senior faculty, was teaching freshman
courses—he once said that in his freshman course, students will ask, “What are going to cover this
semester?” and his standard answer was, “It doesn’t matter what we cover. It matters what you
discover.” And that’s right. Teaching ought to be inspiring students to discover on their own. To
challenge if they don’t agree. To look for alternatives if they think there are better ones. To work
through the great achievements of the past and try to master them on their own because they’re
interested in it. If that’s the way teaching is done, students will really gain from it and not only
remember what they studied, but will be able to use it as a basis for going on on their own. And
again, education is really aimed at just helping students get to the point where they can learn on
their own. Because that’s what you’re going to do for your life, not just absorb materials that are
given to you from the outside and repeat it.

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