Power Systems by Noam Chomsky Read Free Book Online Page A

independence, the way of looking at the world that we were talking about before, people are going to come for your throat because they won’t want to be governed. So yes, let’s have a mass education system, but of a particular kind, one that inculcates obedience, subordination, acceptance of authority, acceptance of doctrine. One that doesn’t raise too many questions. Deweyite education was quite counter to this. It was libertarian education.
    The conflicts about what education ought to be go right back through the early Enlightenment. There are two striking images that I think capture the essence of the conflict. One view is that education should be like pouring water into a bucket. As we all know from our own experiences, the brain is a pretty leaky bucket, so you can study for an exam on some topic in a course you’re not interested in, learn enough to pass the exam, and a week later you’ve forgotten what the course was. The water has leaked out. But this approach to education does train you to be obedient and follow orders, even meaningless orders. The other type of education was described by one of the great founders of the modern higher education system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, a leading figure and founder of classical liberalism. He said education should be like laying out a string that the student follows in his own way. 7 In other words, giving a general structure in which the learner—whether it’s a child or an adult—will explore the world in their own creative, individual, independent fashion. Developing, not only acquiring knowledge. Learning how to learn.
    That’s the model you do find in a good scientific university. So if you’re at MIT, a physics course is not a matter of pouring water into a bucket. This was described nicely by one of the great modern physicists, Victor Weisskopf, who died some years ago. When students would ask him what his course would cover, he would say, “It doesn’t matter what we cover. It matters what you discover.” In other words, if you can learn how to discover, then it doesn’t matter what the subject matter is. You will use that talent elsewhere. That’s essentially Humboldt’s conception of education.
    I should say that I learned about this not from books but from experience. I was in a Deweyite experimental school. That was the way things worked. It seemed very natural. I only read about it later.
    The battle over education has been going on for quite some time now. The 1960s were a major period of agitation, activism, exploration, and they had a major civilizing effect on the society: civil rights, women’s rights, a whole range of things. But for elites, it was a dangerous time because it had too much of a civilizing effect on the society. People were questioning authority, wanting to know answers, not just accepting everything that was handed down. There was an “excess of democracy.” 8
    Looking for answers—that’s frightening. There was an immediate backlash in the 1970s, and we’re still living with the results. All of this is well documented. Two of the striking documents, which I think are very much worth reading, from opposite ends of the spectrum, are, on the Right, the Powell memorandum and, on what’s called the Left, the Trilateral Commission report.
    Lewis Powell was a corporate lobbyist for the tobacco industry who was very close to Nixon, who later appointed him to the Supreme Court. In 1971, he wrote a memorandum to the Chamber of Commerce, the main business lobby. 9 It was supposed to be secret but it leaked. It’s quite interesting reading, not only for the content but also because of the style, which is pretty typical of business literature and of totalitarian culture in general. It reads a little like NSC-68. 10 The whole society is crumbling, everything is being lost. The universities are being taken over by followers of Herbert Marcuse. The media and the