Power Systems by Noam Chomsky Read Free Book Online Page B

government have been taken over by the Left. Ralph Nader is destroying the private economy, and so on. Businessmen are the most persecuted element in the society, but we don’t have to accept it, Powell said. We don’t have to let these crazy people destroy everything. We have the wealth. We’re the trustees of the universities. We’re the people who own the media. We don’t have to let all this happen. We can get together and use our power to force things in the direction that we want—of course he used nice terms such as democracy and freedom.
    It is such a grotesque caricature, you have to wonder what lunacy could allow people to think like this. But it’s normal. Like a three-year-old who doesn’t get his way, if you think you ought to own everything and you’ve lost anything, everything is gone. That’s very much the attitude of those who are accustomed to power and believe they have a right to power.
    At the other end of the spectrum, you have the Trilateral Commission report, The Crisis of Democracy , written by liberal internationalists, Carter administration liberals, basically. They were concerned about what they called the failure of the “institutions which have played the major role in the indoctrination of the young.” 11 The young are not being properly indoctrinated by the schools, the churches. We can see that from the pressures for too much democracy. And we have to do something about it. It’s not very different from Powell’s memorandum. It’s a little more nuanced, but it’s essentially the same idea.
    Too much freedom, too much democracy, not enough indoctrination—how do you deal with that? In the educational system, you move toward more control, more indoctrination, cutting back on the dangerous experiments with freedom and independence. That’s what we’ve seen. These shifts correspond to the period when corporatization of the universities began to take place, with a sharp rise in managerial structures and a “bottom line” approach to education, and also when tuitions start to rise. The tuition problem has become so huge that it’s on the front pages now. Student debt is on the scale of credit-card debt and by now it probably exceeds it. 12 Students are burdened by huge debts. The laws have been changed so there’s no way out—no bankruptcy, no escape. 13 So you’re trapped for life. That’s quite a technique of indoctrination and control.
    There’s no economic basis for rising tuition costs. In the 1950s, our society was much poorer, but education was essentially free. The GI bill, was, of course, selective—it was for whites, not blacks, mostly men, not women—but it did offer free education to a huge part of the population that never would have gotten to college otherwise. 14 More broadly, tuition was very low by current standards. It was a great help to the economy, incidentally. The 1950s and the 1960s were the decades of the greatest economic growth in history, and the newly educated population was a significant part of that story.
    Now we’re a much richer society than we were in the 1950s. Productivity has increased a lot. There’s way more wealth. So it’s ludicrous to think that education can’t be funded. The same conclusion can be drawn by looking at other countries. Take, say, Mexico. It’s a poor country. It has quite a decent higher education system. The quality is high. Teacher salaries are low by our standards, but the system is quite respectable. And it’s free. Actually, the government did try some years ago to add a small tuition, but there was a national student strike and the government backed down. 15 So education in this poor country is still free. The same is true in rich countries such as Germany and Finland, which has the best education system in the world by many measures. 16 Education in these countries is free—or virtually