Noam Chomsky: Don't Seek To 'Persuade' Others To Your Own Views

he's talking about the teaching and they said that the problem with the teaching there is a people teachers are more preoccupied with the transmission of knowledge than with the creation among other values of a critical spirit from the social point of view of the educational systems are oriented to maintaining the existing social and economic structures instead of transforming them do you think there's a general characteristic of Education it's and I think it's more general than it's not universal of course there are exceptions but substantially I think that's probably true most all of you can check your own experience and see whether it's true the idea of educating people to challenge to think for themselves to create to challenge what you're saying for example that's what an educational objective really should be you're not giving the student body orders saying here's what you must believe but here's what I think and you tell me whether it's right that is that impact on your teaching the way you try to teach that's the way to try you can tell whether it succeeded it worked for me there's one thing though that you wrote which I kind of took the heart a little earlier I don't know what I took to heart but there's a really interesting discussion of the fact that Gandhi apparently thought that persuasion was a form of violence and you wrote if you're with children or teaching or involved in a discussion or talking to an audience ideally you should not try to persuade them that is to get them to accept your position and then you went on to say it this should be true of teaching there's no port point in persuading people if you're teaching say physics which I thought was a good choice there's no point in persuading a student that you're right you want to encourage them to find out what the truth is which is probably that you're wrong very often yeah and which is which is a really important point about teaching but I was particularly taken with something that you wrote afterwards for reasons that may be clear it said I'm always put off by people who are called good speakers by those who can rouse an audience that's just what you do not want if you have the capacity to do it you should suppress it and I thought I thought you when I get you laborat I think that's right an orator rhetoric is the art or science what do we call it of persuading people by appealing to their emotions they're getting undermining their capacity for independent thought and inquiry for challenge for invention for creation it's exactly the opposite of what it ought to be I mean I have heard speakers who were inspiring and I can understand the appeal but people should resist it but I think okay so I've been trying to think of things to disagree with you on here and that could be hard but let me put it to you this way that I've often with my with Richard Dawkins debated the question of how to convince people or how to get people to think critically and have said that that that you're really teaching is really seduction in a way because you can't assume people understood what you have to say if you do then then you've lost a lot of them so it seems to me that if you're really interested in getting this step of critical thinking you first have to motivate people to want to think critically or to want to be interested enough than topic than critically and that's where if you wish the idea of sort of rousing in and interest and I don't think if you if you can unless you pass that natural sort of suspicion that I don't think you can get people to the critical thinking critically unless you sort of motivate people is to bring up the issues problems puzzles that challenge them and then ask them try to think get help them to think through ways of the interpreting maybe solving these problems there's an old if you go back to the Enlightenment there were kind of two models counter posed for teaching one was the concept of pouring a liquid into a vessel and we've all been through that and as we all know it's a pretty leaky vessel when you memorize those books to pass the Sociology test a week later I'll bet you forgot what the topic was I was like Woody Allen I remember his line about rent I took a speed reading course read war and peace in five minutes it's about Russia yeah anyway but about the other model which was counter posed this was laying out a string along which the student which the student pursues in his or her own way so there's some structure to education but the real task is to make it possible for the student to pursue to investigate that structure to explore it maybe to modify it could be the room structure and if you if you succeed in that you've actually thought well let me give you an example the best math course I ever took a graduate course and a modern algebra back in the 1940s the instructor was a very good mathematician would come in race the blackboard write down something on the blackboard look at it and ask the class is that a theorem and the rest of the session was the efforts of the class to either prove or disprove what was up there the instructor of course participated if things went in the wrong direction maybe give you some hints but it was basically the task was not look this is a theorem here's where I'm going to prove it but you find out whether this is a theorem or this is false and whay you actually learn something you learn how to be a mathematician not just to discover whether that's saying written there is true or false to discover for yourself which is really there was the only way and then it internalized yeah then it's internalized which is I think one of the reasons that graduate students should be encouraged to not take classes actually is to unless their classes like this yeah yeah exactly

Channel: Christian G

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Keywords: Noam Chomsky (Author), Lawrence M. Krauss (Academic), asu, arizona, state, university, Arizona State University (College/University), College (TV Genre), Knowledge (Quotation Subject), don't, seek, to, Persuasion (Quotation Subject), persuade, others, your, own, views, education, vessel

Id: F8WDMKOU-OI

Length: 6min 46sec (406 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 07 2015