Noam Chomsky: Education For Whom and For What

[Music] good evening everyone my name is john paul jones and i'm the dean of the college of social behavioral sciences [Applause] thank you on behalf of the college's faculty staff and students uh i want to welcome all of you here tonight uh for a first annual sbs annual lecture and without a doubt this is going to be a very hard act to follow before we get started i have a few people to thank uh the first is al bergeson head of the department of sociology who recommended this series as a way to showcase the best of the social behavioral sciences to our local community and second i'd like to thank two faculty who have been long associated with professor chomsky and who helped make his appearance here tonight possible massimo piatelli paul marini and thomas bevere teach in our world-class department of linguistics and in fact there are so many faculty with research ties to chomsky in the department of linguistics that this department is sometimes referred to as mit west i'd also like to thank the head of the department of linguistics simeen karimi as well as the many faculty staff and students from the department who have been working so hard on this event on the screen behind me is a list of some of the donors who have helped sponsor tonight's lecture i would especially like to thank our co-sponsor confluence center for creative inquiry and its director javier duran financial support has also come from members of the sbs magellan circle and tonight uh tonight's event is especially underwritten by magellan circle member elise collins shields and her husband creston shields thank you very much i'd also like to thank the support of the arizona daily star the college of education and it's dean ron marks and the college of humanities and its dean mary wilner bassett other thank you others contributing to this event include the school of anthropology the cognitive science program the department of communication the department of computer science the school of geography and development the department of gender and women's studies the school of government and public policy the department of history the school of journalism the center for middle eastern studies the school of middle eastern and north african studies the department of psychology the department of sociology and the ua bookstores and thanks to everyone in the dean's office and in sbs development and uh uh in the centennial group uh centennial hall group have uh put all this together thank you all very much well now uh what can i say about tonight's speaker who after all uh has been as intellectually influential as noam chomsky the author of 100 books and countless articles he is the founder of modern linguistics his ideas have not only revolutionized linguistics they have indelibly shaped anthropology cognitive science childhood education computer science the languages mathematics psychology philosophy and speech in fact you can find self-described chomskyites in every field that asks the question what does it mean to be human if there was a nobel prize for social and behavioral sciences he would have won it long ago with his uh original book the first book syntactic structures which appeared in 1957 he is according to the chicago tribune the most cited living author and he's third most cited in the world behind plato and freud professor chomsky gave a a research talk yesterday to a small group 1200 faculty students and community members in the ua student union and i have to say i was overwhelmed by the response tucson by all rights you have a claim on the title the athens of the west and of course there is chomsky the public intellectual the self-described libertarian socialist and anarchist a critic of established politicians on both the left and the right an activist who has influenced millions professor chomsky is well known for his relentless critiques of u.s foreign policy from his outspoken stance against the vietnam war in his first political book american power and the new mandarins to its forthcoming 2012 volume a collection of essays titled making the future occupations interventions empire and resistance the topic of tonight's lecture education for whom and for what draws on another line of critique one based on a lifetime of thinking about education's role in the pursuit of democracy justice and freedom for us at the university of arizona these issues are of utmost importance as we grapple with how to maintain quality and access in the face of over 180 million dollars of budget cuts in recent years today only 16 of the total university budget comes from the state a figure that was is half of what it was 10 years ago of course these cuts have occurred not just in arizona but in all states and they go directly to the question of whether higher education should be a public good a common investment in our children's and our state's futures or instead solely a private matter left to would-be students and their families professor chomsky's remarks tonight will undoubtedly spark reflection on this and many other questions related to education now i'd like to say a few words about tonight's proceedings following professor chomsky's talk we have allotted approximately 30 minutes for a question and answer period moderated by arizona public media's christopher conover who was up here a minute ago mr conover has over 23 years of experience in broadcast journalism and has been a mainstay at kuat and kuaz since 2005 and i'm very grateful to him for his help tonight [Applause] finally throughout the evening i ask that whatever your opinions you respect those of our guests and your neighbors in the audience for tonight we have a unique opportunity to engage in thoughtful civil discourse with one of the greatest intellectuals and public figure figures of our time please join me in giving a warm tucson welcome to professor noam chomsky [Applause] thank you very much [Applause] [Music] i can't hear what you're saying [Applause] couldn't hear it but i'm sure it was very important so i hope everyone else did well i'm going to concentrate mostly on higher education but that can't really be disconnected from what happens from infancy so i'll say some words about early education too in the background there are contrasting conceptions of who whom education is for and what it is for so let's take a look at whom it is for uh weren't there two view two fundamental views go far back uh one of them one view is that education is higher education is uh for basically for the elites uh for the privileged uh the rest of the population should be dumbed down maybe allowed entry into vocational schools learned trades there's a more general conception that lies in the background and which strikingly holds across the mainstream political spectrum it's more instructive almost always to focus on the left liberal extremes so i'll keep to that the less harsh extreme so for example the the leading public intellectual of the 20th century uh walter lippmann who was a kind of a wilson roosevelt kennedy liberal uh his view was that uh the general that we have to distinguish between the intelligent minority called the responsible men and what he called the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders that's the general population who have to be spectators but not participants in action and the responsible men incidentally anyone who ever discusses this is always part of the intelligent minority by definition so the intelligent minority the responsible men who are in charge of decision making they have to be protected in his words from the aurora and the trampling of the bewildered herd he developed the concept of manufacture of consent is it a new art of democracy which has to be used to keep the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders from interfering he was actually relying on his own experience this was these were writings in the 1920s incidentally they're called progressive essays on democracy uh he was relying on his experience in the first and in many ways only official u.s propaganda agency the committee on public information that orwell would have liked it was the creel commission established during the first world war to try to drive a pacifist population into raving war mongers and it worked pretty successfully uh it was led by the responsible men the intelligent minority who were more or less unaware that they themselves were the targets of an earlier propaganda agency the british ministry of information another orwellian phrase which was essentially designed to control the thought of american elites so they would therefore participate in the great task of bringing america into the first world war on england's side the another member of the creel commission who was also very impressed by it was edward bernays he's the one of the main founders of the modern public relations industry and his views were about the same there has to be an intelligent minority in control and we have to have a technique he called it engineering of consent to make sure that the rabble stays in their place as spectators not participants that's uh uh uh the the basic view goes back much farther uh so for example long before this uh ralph waldo emerson was considering the question of why political leaders are interested in having public education mass public education was just beginning and he said that the ground on which eminent public servants urged the claims of popular education is fear in their words he says this country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters and you must educate them to keep them from our throats meaning educate them the right way keep their perspectives and their understanding and narrow and restricted discourage free and independent thought and frighten them into obedience something that's done over and over in the schools as well we've all experienced it if you back still farther to the framing of the constitution it was based essentially on the same principles so james madison the major framer his view was that pretty much the same he said we have to make sure that the public is marginalized uh because otherwise there'll be trouble and in fact he if you read the speeches in the constitutional convention he urged the convention to think about what would happen in england that was obviously the model what would happen in england if they really had a democratic vote he said well what would happen would be that the majority of the population would use their voting power to take away the property of the rich to carry out what these days we would call land reform and obviously that would be unjust so therefore we've got to guard against democracy actually it's kind of interesting that whether consciously or not madison was reformulating an argument that goes back to the first main major study of political theory aristotle's book politics aristotle reviewed the many forms of government there could be and didn't like any of them but decided that democracy would be the least bad he's of course mostly thinking of athens and but he raised the same dilemma he said this same problem that madison did he said one of the big problems of democracy is that the majority of the poor would use their voting power to take away and divide up the property of the rich which is unjust so madison and aristotle face the same problem but they picked opposite they drew opposite conclusions aristotle's conclusion was we should eliminate inequality make everyone middle class more or less and he proposed actual measures for this what we would call today welfare state measures and that would overcome the problem so reduce inequality overcome the problem the madison solution was the opposite reduced democracy so design a system in which the public will not be able to exercise the kind of free vote that would threaten the main one of the main goals of government which he said is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority so therefore so same problem but opposite conclusions reduce democracy and if you look at the framing of the constitution that's the way it's designed so again in madison's words the constitutional framework has to ensure that power is in the hands of what he called the wealth of the nation the responsible men the men who have respect for property and its rights and therefore will ensure that the opulent minority is protected from the majority and that's why in the original framing of the constitution power is primarily in the hands of the senate the senate the executive and that time was kind of an administrator so powers in the hands of the senate uh which remember people didn't vote for uh that was much later and the senate he said would include would be the wealth of the nation the people who would make judicious and responsible decisions actually in madison's defense it should be mentioned that he was at this point pre-capitalist so his model of the wealth of the nation was some you know mythology about uh rome you know where distinguished gentlemen and uh benign aristocrats devoted to the public good would make all the right decisions he soon learned differently but that was the model that's the way that's the original intent of our constitution for those who are interested in original intent originalism to go back a little bit further and go back to say david hume one of the first great modern political philosophers he wrote a book called first principles of government and in this he i'll quote him he wondered at the easiness with which the many are governed by the few and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers when we inquire by what means this wonder is brought about we shall find that as force is always on the side of the governed the governors have nothing to support them for but opinion it is therefore on opinion only that government is founded and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and most popular and in fact in the more free and the more popular where force is less available you get the most sophisticated development of the notions of manufacture of consent engineering of consent public relations industry and so on and the educational system has to be enlisted in this enterprise it's a very conscious policy i'll return to the way it works in the modern period well that's one point of view about whom education is for another alternative point of view including high culture is that it's for everyone and there's interesting work on this uh one book i'd strongly recommend is if you have good eyesight a very tiny print unfortunately is a book by a scholarly book by jonathan rose it's called the intellectual life of the british working classes it's a monumental study of the reading habits of 19th century british workers and it's pretty remarkable to see what they were reading rose contrasts i'll quote him contrasts the passionate pursuit of knowledge by proletarian autodidact with the pervasive philistinism of the british aristocracy and he has good evidence for it and pretty much the same was true in the united states so in boston let's say in the 19th century if a blacksmith had enough could afford it that he would typically hire a young boy to read to him while he's working and reading meant reading classics or contemporary literature that we now consider classics in the fact in the factories that were the mills that were just beginning to be built in the early days of the industrial revolution a lot of the workers were young women from the farms they called factory girls now there was pretty lively labor press at the time and very interesting to read the factory girls had plenty of condemnations of the industrial system into which they were being forced i'll come back to it a little bit but one of them was that it was taking away their high culture they were used to reading contemporary literature classics and so on when they were driven into the mills that was taken away for them from them and this this continued i mean i'm old enough to remember the 1930s at that time there was lively programs of workers education some of the leading scientists and mathematicians wrote popular books intended for worker education and mathematics for the millions and things like that the george gamow later one two three infinity j.d bernal another well-known scientist and there were educational courses i mean my own family my relatives were mostly unemployed working class but they engaged they were deeply immersed in high culture even those who never made it through elementary school they were what rose calls uh proletarian autodidact although they were helped by workers education courses and things like free shakespearean plays and central park and so on well those are two views of whom education is for two contrasting ones then comes the question what it is for and here too there are contrasting views the contrast is actually discussed during the enlightenment and there's an imagery associated with it one image is that education is like pouring water into an empty vessel and in fact it's a pretty leaky vessel as you all know from your experience so you pour water into a vessel and of course all of us have been through this and you remember nothing the other possibility the other alternative is that education teaching should be like laying out a string along which the student can explore and progress in his own way that image comes from wilhelm von humboldt who was the founder of the modern university system also one of the founders of classical liberalism uh you get to john dewey america's greatest social philosopher a century later he wrote that it is illiberal and immoral to train children to work not freely and intelligently but for the sake of the work earned in which case their activity is not free because not freely participated in and as he also pointed out it'll be a leaky vessel those choices contrasting choices are very sharply drawn today i'm sure again that most of you have seen in your own experience i certainly have myself and has very definite policy implications right now in fact after some very recent and very pointed discussion of this which i'll quote the american association for the advancement of science the main scientific organization has a regular journal of journal science and in the last couple of issues the editor biochemist bruce albert sets forth alternatives these alternatives very clearly he's discussing science education in the schools but it generalizes so one approach he discusses is in fact the enlightenment view that teaching is laying out a string along which the student progresses in their own way through discovery and exploration and his version of it is that our goal is to make it much easier for teachers everywhere to provide their students with laboratory experiences that mirror the open-ended explorations of scientists instead of the traditional cookbook labs where students follow instructions to a predetermined result and he contrasts that with actual practice which is of course pretty much the opposite a concept taught with an overly strict attention to rules procedures and rope memorizations then he goes on to quote his own testimony to the california standards commission his testimony opposing such ideas as teaching the periodic table of the elements in fifth grade which totally meaningless to the students incidentally he points out he was unsuccessful in this it's taught that way and what he says is when we teach children about aspects of science that they cannot yet grasp then we have wasted valuable educational resources produced nothing of lasting value and much worse we take all the enjoyment out of science when we do so and he discusses dna his own field he says unfortunately most students today are taught about dna at such an early age that they are forced to merely memorize the fact that there's a quote from a textbook dna is the material from which genes are made to chore that brings no enjoyment or understanding whatsoever and much later he says when they do have the background to understand both the structure of the dna molecule and its explanatory power i fear that the joy of discovery has been eliminated by the early memorization of boring dna facts we spoil the beautiful story for them by teaching it at the wrong time and it goes on to the college level he says for example in an introductory biology class students are often required to learn the names of the 10 enzymes that oxidize sugars but an obsession with such details can obscure any real understanding of the central issue leave students with the impression that science is impossibly dull costs many of them causes many of them to drop it tragically we have managed to simultaneously trivialize and complicate science education as a result far too many for far too many science seems a game of recalling boring incomprehensible facts so much so that it may make little difference whether the factoids about science that come from the periodic table or a movie script and give some examples again i'm sure you've had your own experience about that just to interpret i certainly have i remember when i was a 16 year old freshman at the university of pennsylvania i had to take a general chemistry course with about this many students in the audience it was insufferably boring and first and furthermore it was completely obvious what was going to happen so if you read the textbook you knew exactly what was going to happen so i never went to class but they you know i got an it was okay i actually had a friend who took notes that helped but the but the worst part was that they had a lab and i knew perfectly well that if i went to the lab and carried out the experiments none of them would work that's kind of reflects automatic so i didn't go to the lab there's a there was a manual where you had to fill in the answers to the results of the experiments and again entirely obvious what they were going to be so i filled it in you know got an a and so on but then i had a but then i had a very unpleasant experience i had to register for the next semester and when i tried to register they insisted on my paying a fee for breakage in the laboratory i'd never been to the laboratory i didn't know where it was you know but obviously couldn't say that you know so so i had to pay 17 which was a lot of money in those days for the breakage in the lab that i never attended and of course i don't remember a thing from the course i'm sure many of you can duplicate this experience actually this approach generalizes even has a name it's called no child left behind it's [Applause] i see you've experienced it uh actually it's been going on for about 10 years no reported progress which is no surprise serious education is radically different it's what alberts was recommending and that's the way science is actually taught at the advanced levels so take my own university mit it's a research university there's a famous world famous physicist like victor vice cop who like a lot of senior faculty taught freshman courses and he used to say that when he came to the first session of his freshman course and students would ask what are we going to cover this semester and his routine answer was it doesn't matter what we cover it matters what you discover and maybe you'll discover that what i'm teaching is wrong that would be great that's the kind of thing we want to do this goes on right through the graduate level that's in a serious university that's all there is it's the whole curriculum and that's actually possible all the way down to kindergarten there are examples so in fact albert's in this series of articles it gives a good example he talks about a kindergarten class which won some award in the sciences his five-year-old kids their task the task that was given them each kid in the class was given a dish that contained seeds pebbles and shells and their task was to figure out which ones were the seeds so kids got together what they call the scientific conference and they each had ideas about how you might do it they exchanged the ideas suggested some ways of testing it that you finally carried out the tests they finally got somewhere a little featured guidance but basically figuring it out for themselves it ended up at a point at the point where they were they figured out what were the seeds and they were dissecting the seeds they were given magnifying glasses and could look into it and locate the embryo which is the source of the sustenance that's learning real learning that's enlightenment style learning not no child left behind it can be done and sometimes is like in this case far too little well let's take a brief look at the history not surprisingly the u.s system of higher education has evolved along with broader socioeconomic changes actually a very sharp change at the time of world war ii uh everything changed after world war ii uh it was a very dramatic event in world history the united states had been was the richest country in the world but it wasn't a major actor in the world scene that the major actors were written primarily france germany but not the united states except regionally but after world war ii it was all different totally the united states emerged from world war ii with a position of global dominance that had absolutely no precedent in history and no president since began declining shortly after the united states at that time had literally 50 percent of the world's wealth other industrial societies had been seriously harmed or devastated for the united states which is untouched by the war the war was a tremendous stimulus huge government stimulus to the economy the industrial production quadrupled and it already had been the richest country in the world it also had an overwhelming position of security nothing remotely like it well this affected the whole culture including education prior to this higher education we stayed lead education had been a kind of a gentleman's club and indeed it remained so at the elite schools well after again personal experience again i was a student at harvard in the early 50s and that's exactly what it was it was a gentleman's club but the u.s had also pioneered mass education through college as well in fact that's a very important achievement of american society it was motivated in part by just what emerson talked about uh it was motivated by the transition from an agricultural society of free independent people to an industrial society it was necessary to turn free farmers into disciplined factory workers and since they didn't like it you needed the kind of education that emerson was talking about a kind of education that'll keep them from our throats and it was dramatic i mentioned the labor press and it's very interesting to read factory girls artisans from the towns they have many complaints about the system they're being driven into it's worth reading it's available now the industrial system they said was crushing their culture their dignity their freedom was turning them into something like slaves in fact a century and a half ago a very common belief so common that it was a a slogan of the republican party supported by abraham lincoln was that late that waged labor is different from child slavery only in that it's temporary but other than that it's the same you're being forced you're working on command not under your own initiative so they want to get rid of it worker ownership and so on the most interesting i think the most interesting part element of their critique was their condemnation of what they called the new spirit of the age remember this is 150 years ago the new spirit of the age is gain wealth for getting all but self uh adam smith had talked about that now he called it the vile maxim of the masters of mankind all for ourselves nothing for anyone else and the new spirit of the age a century later was to try to drive this deeply inhuman idea into people's heads it was a very sharp break from traditional societies that valued the trust solidarity and mutual aid for common purposes uh the in our own tradition the standard example is the should be the english commons uh we're going to celebrate it probably won't but we should be commemorating the 900th anniversary of the magna carta the great charter in a couple of months the uh it's forgotten i think magna carta as everyone ought to know is the foundation of civil liberties presumption of innocence trial by jury and due process and so on but it's sort of forgotten interestingly that there were two charters there was a charter of liberties and there was a charter of the forests the charter of the forest was about preservation of the commons the commons were including the forests were the possession of everyone and they were the source of food of fuel of building materials they had been carefully cultivated with mutual aid and mutual support for centuries so they were very complex ecosystems which everyone had access to and the charter of the great charter that calls for preservation of the commons from the predatory acts of the kings and nobles well that's been forgotten so nobody talks about that anymore and that's a very serious problem because the in fact that the failure to attend to the commons is going to destroy us that's the environmental crisis which we're marching towards with uh utter abandon if some extraterrestrial observer was watching i think we're all lunatics but what's going on right now and unless the year [Applause] i mean unless this conception of the preservation of the commons and the values that were part of it unless that's restored we're in trouble well shortly after that with the beginnings of capitalist industrialization there's a move towards making everything a commodity and it then becomes necessary to inculcate the new spirit of the new spirit of the age gain wealth for getting old itself and reverence for what adam smith condemned as the vile maxim actually there are major industries devoted to it the public relations industry advertising marketing it's probably a sixth of gross national domestic product is devoted pretty much to this it's devoted very consciously interesting to read the literature their own literature it's devoted to create what's called creating wants fancied needs stimulating consumerism turning people's attention to what are called the superficial things of life like fashionable consumption and away from real human values and enormous work goes into this uh keep people from our throats again that new spirit of the age is so inhuman so that over 150 years of effort there's still is always resistance so in the early 1970s as kind of an outgrowth of 1960s activism there was a very important series of labor strikes the most young young workers mostly many of them vietnam veterans others just young people getting into the workforce the most famous one was at lordstown and striking very significantly they were not striking particularly for wages and benefits but for dignity for human dignity in the workplace that was also the time when women were becoming organized and active and chicanos and farm workers black unions and so on all of this was beaten back and it's been beaten back for a generation uh but it's there in fact the occupy movements that are spreading all over are reviving it there and a lot i think it's their main significance uh and a lot hinges on whether the new spirit of the age 150 years old or whether it can be and in fact in england going back centuries the destruction of the commons uh it's uh very signific important to to determine whether this new spirit can be overcome if not we're just lemmings walking off the cliff and soon there's a lot to say about that but i'll put it aside well again after world war ii going back to that there was a another new spirit a spirit of triumphalism before the second world war the united states was a kind of a cultural uh intellectual backwater if you wanted to study the science or philosophy or the arts or to be a writer you went to europe you know germany britain france someplace like that but after world war ii that all changed and it led to just a different attitude i mean i remembered very well i was just becoming a college student at the time the atmosphere was that we should shed all of this old world baggage and lead the world to a bright future what was called an american century european scholars many of whom were emigrating here fleeing nazi germany they were feared because they were too good and they were disdained because that's the old-fashioned baggage and the two were at the same time there were many very ugly incidents i could tell you about some of them which i remember from a student perspective like what i was in the 1940s in philosophy linguistics and psychology they just had to start afresh disregard all of this old nonsense from europe uh biology too in fact forget it all don't talk about it and start from the beginning you know we're going to create a new age and a lot of contempt and a lot of ignorance and there are many consequences some of them right to the present it's very striking in the behavioral sciences in fact but also elsewhere there were also changes at that time crucial changes in the nature in the way the economy functioned in the state role in the economy which had a huge impact on the universities higher education particularly you go back to the colonial period adam smith gave advice to the colonies the greatest economist of the day and the advice he gave was the standard prescriptions that the world bank and the imf and the u.s treasury and others give to the poor countries today you know pursue your comparative advantage don't try to import higher manufactured goods more advanced goods from the advanced countries and so don't try to control your resources everything will be better if you do that well the united states was independent by that time so they were able to totally reject the rules of what are called sound economics and they did if we had accepted them we'd be a third world country but in fact that's how the third world was pretty much created but the colonies could reject it the so-called hamiltonian system introduced very high tariffs to block superior british manufacturers there was a lot of stealing of technology what's now called piracy and the united states began to develop it and this went from textiles the early stages of industrialization right through steel and you know on pretty much till the second world first and second world war uh the after there was a very a huge role of the state system in uh state sector in developing the economy mass industrialization was developed for example in the armories because there you could control things the railroad system was managed by the army corps of engineers and so on well after world war ii that took a major leap forward uh huge uh there was uh massive funding for science and technology mostly through the pentagon and it was done through the pentagon for the usual reasons uh you have to inspire fear and you can get taxpayers to you know pay the pentagon to protect us from various imaginary dangers but it with the money that went through the pentagon ended up creating the high-tech economy that we're now living in so computers internet satellites microelectronics a whole array of stuff comes out of decades of mostly pentagon funding and research my own university mit was right in the middle of it uh the uh and uh the net effect is to socialize cost and to privatize profit and it's a standard device interstate highway systems another example it's not what it's claimed to be it was sold on the basis of defense it was really part of the mass subsidy to uh uh automobiles uh energy corporations rubber corporations and turned us into it the idea was to make us a a society that massively used wastes fossil fuels with consequences we're now in the middle of there was also a rapid expansion of the student body through the gi bill which brought a whole new sector of the population into higher education people never could have gone before that had a very positive impact on the colleges and on the general society that's incidentally a course that's been reversed in the last generation i'll come back to it the the sharp increase in funding was mainly directed to science and technology but of course there was a spillover into other domains uh 1957 the russians sent a satellite into space sputnik and there was laments about how the u.s is falling behind you know going to be destroyed and so on the scientific community knew that this was total nonsense that there was just the achievement was essentially nothing we could duplicate it and go way beyond it anytime we wanted to but it was exploited it was exploited pretty cynically i should say i remember it very well and it was exploited to give an enormous additional input into higher education and also k to 12. that's when you get the start of the kinds of things that alberts is deploring like new math for example i have to say i had young kids at that time we had very amusing experiences with watching my you know young children ten-year-old nine ten-year-old children try to learn new math from teachers who didn't understand a word about the set theoretic basis for it but we're trying to teach it and the kids were kind of making up their own i'll just give you one example when my daughter one youngest daughter was i don't know maybe 10 or so uh we had a i had a visit from a friend an israeli logician as an old friend yehoshua some of you know he uh he came and stayed with us for a while and he saw my daughter doing her work in what was called boolean outside there's called set theory actually boolean algebra and he was interested because he'd been trying to teach it to junior high school students in israel and they're having a hard time doing it and she seemed to be doing it fine so we started asking her questions like if you have three things how many sets are there you know like a milk bottle and a cup and a book or something and she said write off eight sets and then he asked well then he asked her to list them she listed them all including the null said and he asked which set is included in all the others they said denal said and then i couldn't believe it so i asked her how do you know the null set is included in all the others so she said well to have a set what you do is draw braces and you put the things inside it and if you look carefully there's always a little space between them that's where the law said so what in fact that happened is she was doing something quite sensible she was making up a physical model which happened to work for these principles and of course that has like nothing to do with what they were trying to teach them and this was going on all the time it's uh that's no child left behind well in the in the 60s there were major changes major social cultural changes the civil rights movement moved towards diversity women's rights all sorts of things and the universities were greatly enriched by that as indeed was the whole society by the end of the 60s there was also a fair amount of political activism developing and it became a major force so again at my own university mit mainly science university it had been extremely conservative and passive right through the 60s people are absorbing their work but by the end of the 60s by 1969 activism had gotten to the point that a day was set aside formally to just consider the question of the whole institute to consider the question of the role of technology in society amazingly a question that had never been asked you just do it and that led to a lot of consequences which in fact have changed the uh made wrote about a permanent change in the institute and similar things were happening in other places this was a even abroad too it's a very it's a general movement uh well the and it had a uh a real civilizing effect on the whole society well that civilizing effect of the 1960s concerns all across the mainstream spectrum that's why it's usually called the time of troubles it was civilizing the country too much and that's dangerous and it's kind of interesting that i'll talk a little about the reaction it has effects very strong effects right to the present uh on the right one striking example was a influential memorandum which it's worth reading you can pick it up on the internet a memorandum by lewis powell was a corporate lawyer he was later appointed by nixon the supreme court at the other end of the spectrum there's an important study also worth reading by the trilateral commission these are liberal internationalists from the three major industrial regions europe united states and japan their general outlook is indicated by the fact that the carter administration was drawn almost completely from their ranks that's who they were the and both of them merit attention they provide a good insight into the ideological aspects of what has in fact been a major assault on democracy and on rights that was beginning to take shape 40 years ago escalated pretty sharply in the reagan thatcher years and continued and it's now reaching new heights and they also provide insight into how this assault targets the educational system so let's start with powell's memorandum 1971. this was sent to the u.s chamber of commerce that's the main business lobby the title was the attack on the american free enterprise system that's worth reading not only for the content but also for the tone which is totally paranoid which is characteristic the major criminals were ralph nader with his consumer safety campaigns herbert marcuza who was preaching marxism new leftists on the rampage but primarily they're naive victims who dominate the universities the schools television and other media the educated community and virtually control the government if you haven't noticed it i'm incidentally not exaggerating that's exactly what it said i urge you to read it well the takeover of the country by these devils is a dire threat to freedom he said because the only alternatives to free enterprise are varying degrees of bureaucratic regulation of individual freedom ranging from moderate socialism to the leftist and brightest dictatorships actually if any of you are watching the republican debates it's being the same thing as being repeated right now you know the center right obama administration or marxist radicals and so on uh actually powell was very familiar with another alternative to free enterprise and namely the system in which he and his chamber of commerce associates thrived he was a influential lobbyist for the tobacco industry and he was surely aware of the huge federal subsidies for the production of this leading killer which not only kills users at a scale that vastly exceeds the targets of the mostly farcical drug wars but also kills many others deaths from passive smoking collateral damage you know just being around when somebody's smoking uh way beyond those from uh hard drugs and he was surely aware of the great successes of lobbyists like him in assuring that for many decades the government would help the not only subsidize the industry but help it conceal what they all knew they knew about the lethal product that they were peddling and there are huge mounds of corp corpses to show for their achievement they're still piling up rapidly but that didn't keep him from wailing in his memo that i'll quote as every business executive knows few elements of american society today have as little influence in government as the american businessman corporation even the millions of corporate stockholders in case you hadn't noticed and that again is considered is pretty characteristic and the reason is that there's an assumption that for the state to support subsidized private power that's just the natural order any disruption of it is a catastrophe and he then drew the obvious conclusion he was talking about the universities he said the campuses from which much of this emanates are supported by tax funds generated largely from american business and contributions from capital funds controlled or generated by american business the boards of trustees of our universities overwhelmingly are composed of men and women who are leaders in the business system most of the media including the national tv systems are owned and theoretically controlled by corporations which depend on profits and the enterprise system to survive and therefore these marginalized groups who are being destroyed should organize to defend themselves instead of just watching passively while business and our fundamental freedoms are destroyed by this marxist onslaught from the media and the universities well powell's memo expresses the concerns elicited by 1960s activism at the right end of the mainstream spectrum but much more revealing i think is the reaction at the opposite extreme the liberal internationalists and these are spelled out in the uh trilateral commission report that i mentioned it's called the crisis of democracy it's not easy to find incidentally because they mostly took it off the market when people started reading but it's there and actually i should say that my own at mit as soon as i read it i read it when it came out and i figured this isn't going to last very long so i bought a lot of copies from the mit library so if you can't find one mit library has maybe a dozen or so copies and then it did go out of print i should say very quickly the crisis of democracy that they were talking about is literally that there's too much democracy the problem they said this is leading figures you know major political scientists from harvard and so on the public the way that work the democratic order is supposed to work the public is supposed to be passive and apathetic the lippin bernais emerson madison model or hume uh they're supposed to be passive apathetic but in the 60s they were beginning to organize to press their demands that's what the was being done by what are called the special interests the special interests are uh women young people old people workers farmers yeah the population in other words they're the special interests if you look through the and when they press their demands there's too much pressure on the state state can't deal with them so therefore they have to moderate the demands now there's one group that isn't mentioned the corporate sector and that makes sense because they represent the national interest not special interests so just like the far right the liberal international internationalists assume that the their extraordinary power and their control of the state and other institutions is just the natural order a primary concern of the trilateral scholars just like lewis powell was the failures of what they called on quoting the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young the schools the universities the churches and the like they're not carrying out their duty to indoctrinate the young properly and that's why we had this time of troubles in general they said we have to have more moderation in democracy if the national interest is to be protected including much more successful indoctrination of the young well the power memo and the trilateral study spill out the concerns at the opposite extremes of the dominant ideological spectrum these are largely shared concerns and they've led to vigorous action to restore the order as has often happened in the past one consequence of these uh and other developments has been a pretty sharp attack on public education taking many forms i'll mention a few about a year ago i i went to mexico to give talks at the national university quite a good universe poor very poor country of course but pretty quite a good impressive university high standards good faculty you know lively discussion reasonable facilities not like a rich american university but quite reasonable i also visited a city university there's a city university in mexico city which as instantly unam is free no tuition about 10 years ago there was an attempt by the government to raise just a very low tuition that led to a national student strike countries correctly closed down the government withdrew the proposal that actually still on the onam campus is a an administration building that was occupied at the time and is still occupied and it's used as a kind of activism center uh the city university is not only free but has open admissions with compensatory options for those who need them and it's also pretty respectable i was quite impressed to see it well i went from mexico to california maybe the richest place in the world there the public education system which is just you know the best public education system in the world is being destroyed it's being privatized for the rich of course for the rest of some level of mostly technical training and that's it's quite a contrast between a poor country and in many ways the richest place in the world uh and that's happening all across the country so in most states like here i just heard before tuition a tuition in most states tuition covers more than half of college budgets that's also true of most public research universities pretty soon only the community colleges will be state financed and even they are under attack uh i'm quoting a recent study analysts generally agree that the era of affordable for four-year public universities subsidized by the state may be over that's one important way to implement indoctrination of the young for a very good simple reason students leave in a debt trap when you have a there's a college debt has reached the astonishing level of over a trillion dollars now when you a student leaves college with a big debt they don't have many options indoctrination is working that's true of social control generally it's also an important feature of international policy well as the mexico california comparison illustrates the reasons for the conscious destruction of the greatest public education system in the world in california and comparable things elsewhere the reasons are not economic there are many other cases including rich societies so germany to mention one or for that matter the post-war u.s experience much poorer country than we are now but it wasn't totally free but tuition was very low so for example when i went to the university of pennsylvania as an undergraduate it was literally a hundred dollars a year that might be 400 today it's not a economic reason but as a technique of indoctrination it's very valuable well if they're not publicly supported how are universities going to survive that they don't produce commodities for profit and that's the dominant value under the new spirit of the age the funding issue raises many troubling issues these would not arise if fostering independent thought and inquiry were regarded as a public good as during the in the enlightenment model that is as having intrinsic value uh the traditional ideal of the universities however flawed in practice and there are major attempts to change that so crossing the ocean in britain the right-wing government is now challenging what was called what's been for century called the haldane principle it's a century-old principle that barred government intrusion into academic research whether they'll succeed in overturning it i don't know and well there's another kind of assault on intellectual culture you can read about in this morning's newspapers uh the cameron government has announced that it's not going to apologize it's not going to give an apology for essentially murdering that one of the great mathematicians and scientists of the 20th century alan turing who apart from being a major fig intellectual figure also happened to be a war hero he was crucially involved in decoding the german codes something which saved britain they killed him basically drove him to suicide and cameron the prime minister said they're not going to apologize because turing broke the law he was guilty of the crime of homosexuality which is a violation of law this should be a major scandal i mean on how to describe it but we'll see if it is it isn't so far well for the in the united states for say research institutions like my own mit the way the problem is being dealt with is by a shift to more corporate funding and that has several effects first of all there's more emphasis on short-term applied work so funding from say the pentagon or the nih they're concerned with the long-term future of the advanced economy that incidentally means also the profitability of the corporate sector long afterwards so develop computers the internet for a couple of decades and it ends up being profitable for the private corporations that feed off it that's the socializing costs privatizing profit principle well that's government funding pentagon funding for example a very free best funder there is i was funded by them for a long time in contrast to a business firm that typically wants something it can use not its competitors and it wants to be able to use it tomorrow i don't know of a careful study but it appears that the shift towards corporate funding in fact does lead to more short-term applied research and less exploration of white what might turn out to be interesting and valuable for the longer-term future and another consequence of the shift from say pentagon funding to corporate funding is more secrecy during the pentagon funded era at mit i happened to be in a faculty student committee which examined it carefully decades of pentagon funding there was no secrecy on campus one exception was the political science department but in the sciences there was no secrecy literally true they were involved in the vietnam war but so not in the physics department engineering departments nowhere else that's not true today corporate funders cannot they of course cannot force secrecy but have an indirect way of doing it they can threaten non-renewal of contracts that's led to some scandals some of them severe enough to have landed on the front page of the wall street journal involving mit corporatization can also have a considerable influence in other ways corporations by their nature focus on profit making that's what they're for and they seek to convert as much of life as possible into commodities there's a lot to say about this topic in no time but one particular consequence is the focus on what's called efficiency efficiency is not a simple economic concept it has quite crucial ideological dimensions so for example if a business reduces personnel it becomes more efficient by standard measures with lower costs but quite typically that shifts a burden to the public it's a very familiar phenomenon and the costs to the public are not counted that's not a choice based on economic theory but ideology and that applies directly to the business models for the university increasing class size using cheap temporary labor instead of full-time faculty graduate students for example then other measures like that may look good on university budgets but significant costs are transferred to the students and to the society generally as the quality of instruction is affected there's furthermore no way to measure the human and the social costs of converting the schools and universities into facilities that produce commodities for the job market abandoning the traditional ideal of the universities encouraging creative and independent thought and inquiry challenging received beliefs exploring the horizons free of external constraints it's an ideal that's undoubtedly been flawed in practice but nevertheless it is a kind of a measure of the level of civilization achieved well the related consequences for the k-12 is a major assault on the public schools underway and the main reason is the new spirit of the age public schools are based on a very dangerous principle they're based on the principle that we care about one another so for violation of the new spirit of the age uh so me for example i don't happen to have kids in the schools anymore obviously so why should i pay taxes i mean i'm not getting anything out of it so therefore let's get rid of public schools and just do things for ourselves the attack on social security has pretty much the same roots it's based on the principle that you're supposed to care about the disabled widow across town she's supposed to care if she doesn't have food to eat say there are various so why should i care i'm doing fine there are various pretexts offered but they collapse very quickly on examination the real source of these attacks on just humane public values and public goods i think is the passionate effort to instill this hateful and destructive principle this new spirit of the age from going on for 150 years and long before that the attack on the commons and that of instilling it as enormous profits to concentrated private power were very harmful to human effec and human effects there's a related campaign to destroy those parts of the educational system that enrich the lives of students and enable them to follow the string that's laid out for them in the enlightenment vision of education that interferes with indoctrination with control with imposing passivity and obedience with subordination to the principle of caring only about oneself a major struggle about that right here is you know better than i do the destruction of the flourishing mexican american studies program and even and even the removal from classrooms of books that are used in that program this is becoming a national scandal incidentally classics like palo freire the history of chicanos and the mexican civil rights movement looks like [Applause] rethinking columbus even shakespeare's tempest this is all reminiscent of presidents that we don't like to think about but they're worth thinking about and it's particularly dramatic that it's happening right here in the midst of what could properly be called occupied [Applause] mexico well no i don't think it went to it it was conquered in a brutal war of aggression well i don't know any simple answers to the dilemmas that constantly arise in trying to develop and sustain an educational system of independence and integrity the one that strives for the enlightenment ideal and to do this within societies that are dominated by concentrations of power with very different values and goals but at least one thing seems clear enough efforts to do this cannot progress very far in isolation from much broader struggles to protect what has already been achieved and what has been achieved from severe ongoing attacks and to carry them forward towards a world of greater freedom and justice thanks [Applause] okay thank you so much ladies and gentlemen as we get ready for the question and answer uh part of our program tonight a reminder we only have about 30 minutes for this and i can imagine a lot of you if you had paper as i do would have a lot of notes and a lot of questions and a lot of comments for professor chomsky so as we get into this question and answer let me lay out some ground rules some housekeeping if you will we have two microphones in the aisle we'll alternate back and forth as dr jones mentioned at the beginning make sure you respect others opinions we want a thoughtful and civil discourse as he talked about there may be a few difference of opinion in here also the ground rules for this we're not going to do follow-up questions from our people in the audience because we want to get as many questions as we can so please try and keep your questions as succinct as possible and we'll get through as many questions as we can in about the next 30 minutes or so i should tell you i don't hear too well so you might have to translate the questions for me yeah am i supposed to use this yeah okay as you line up for the questions and we will have staff there um i'm going to ask the first question i'm going to take moderators privilege here if you will professor chomsky you were talking about um towards the end corporate influence corporate funding and the idea that the universities in the corporate eyes need to turn out commodities mit your home institution now has a new program called open courseware that i know is getting a lot of um uh given out about it for those of you that don't know what it is uh there are many courses at mit that the materials are now available free and online for the public talk about that a little bit and how that may be going against that corporate idea i think it's actually one of my close friends is more or less running but uh i think it's a great idea you know i think it's just what ought to be done i mean of course that means it's available it's available on the internet so not only here but everywhere all over the world you can hear the leading scientists scholars others delivering their lectures you can hear the classroom interaction i mean it's not like taking a course in a in a decent you know in a serious university because you're not part of the interaction like you can't stand up and say that's wrong it's a better way to do it you know which is a lot a large part of what real education is uh it's supposed to encourage independent thought that means challenges and a lot of what we and everybody else is teaching is wrong that's why you don't teach the same thing every year unless your field is dead of course you're learning and a lot of the learning comes from what students are doing they're part of the educational process and you don't interact with other students i'm sure all of you know that just from your own experience that what's enriched your educational experience is peer interchange talking with you with other students you know arguing about things trying to work things out together and so on in any uh like take take my own university since i know it best but um if you walk around the floors of the department so students are talking to each other working together writing joint papers and a lot of very important stuff comes out of that well if you're watching open courseware you're not part of that so it is necessarily kind of passive actually there are efforts being made and it's tricky to develop modes of more interaction and it's not impossible but it's hard and i hope that it'll go to that but the general idea is great i think all right i will abide by our own rules and not ask a follow-up as badly as i would like to let me start on uh this side and again let's keep our questions fairly short so we can get through as many as we can uh hi professor chomsky um first thing i want to say is thank you for visiting the university of arizona and thank you for such a great thought [Applause] i wanted to ask about the two documents you mentioned the powell memorandum and the trilateral commission do you consider that the major reason for the increase in tuition and what other factors uh come into play well i don't really know of any study of this so i have to speculate it's kind of surprising that there isn't as far as i know there isn't any study because it's a major phenomenon but if you just look at the timing and the thinking behind it and other things that are happening in the society it's hard to doubt that the concern about what they called on the liberal end the failure of the institutions to indoctrinate the young their phrase the failure of this which showed up in the active in the civilizing effect of the 60s it was followed very shortly and not only by the beginning of the rise in tuitions but by lots of other things even university architecture so university architecture began to change if you look at universities that were built and designed this is worldwide incidentally you know japan the united states everywhere that are designed in the 70s and the 80s but they usually don't have public places they don't have anything like sprawl plaza and berkeley where students get together and have discussions demonstrations and so on there are paths from here to there but not places for students to get together that is conscious i've talked to architectures about it and i suspect that the same is true of tuitions actually it's a good good topic to study i don't know of any studies but looks very plausible and again there isn't there can't be an economic reason for it for the reasons i mentioned it's got to be an ideological region thanks for your question now come over to this side thank you for coming professor chomsky i just wanted to ask i think a lot of us here are in that group who would say the education is for everyone so in light of things like no child left behind and the hp 2281 anti-ethnic studies my question is about hope what where should we find inspiration as a lot of us being educators in here to kind of go forth with hope for education well for one thing there's uh i mean they say mexico it's right nearby as i say we're basically in it uh the uh [Applause] and it's a it's a poor country and it's not a rich country like us for reasons that have something to do with us as you know but anyway it's a fact and what they do in the higher education system is quite impressive the actually i should add that this city college and city university open city university in mexico city is not old it was instituted by uh obrador when he was the mayor left-wing mayor and mexico city he started it and it's been apparently flourishing since as i say i visited was pretty impressed things like that that's an inspiration or you can look at the student movements over the of this hemisphere i mean from chile up to here in fact there are very lively vibrant student movements in chile it's amazing it has just revitalized the country there's been student protests remember this is protests against the lingering effects of the dictatorship that we imposed on what in latin america is called the first 9 11. it's kind of striking that people here don't know what that means most of them but the first 911 911 1973 by any dimension that i can think of was much worse than what we call 9 11. and not just in chile it had very global effect but and the dictatorship has formally been gone for about 20 years but there are lingering effects just as there are in spain there are lingering effects of the franco dictatorship right now and the young people protesting there the indignators as they're called are trying to undermine the very serious slinging and lingering effects of the dictatorship they're very real well that's chile and there are similar things going on through the hemisphere in fact abroad in fact right here the i mean the protests about the destruction of the mexican studies program for example it's important and a teacher teachers are organizing and there are a lot of pressure you know tremendous pressures against public school teachers you speak up you're thrown out and so on but that doesn't mean that people are taking it passively there are efforts to respond there are journals where people are writing about it and they're the struggles of the past after we've achieved a lot you know this country isn't what it was 30 years ago or a hundred years ago there's a lot more freedom justice rights and so on again take my own university but it generalizes over the country if you walk down the halls at mit when i got there 1950s that you would have seen white males well-dressed very passive very conformist doing their work often very well but that's it that was the institute if you walk down the halls today it looks like this half women third minorities uh informal dress which i mean which symbolizes informal relations and a lot of concerns and activism all sorts of things it didn't happen by magic you know it's happened all over the country in many ways all over the world and that's the kind of inspiration that ought to suffice i think it goes back to the to the early days at the very earliest days way far back as you want to trace it in history thank you over on this site hi i'm denise from chicago first i just want to thank the intergenerational audience that came tonight from where i stand it's so exciting especially seeing all the young people here so thank you to both of you for bringing that out two i'd like to invite you professor chomsky and anyone here to chicago may 19th a concert for troubadour woody guthrie who emulates many of the themes that you talked about tonight and you can find info on the illinois labor history webpage who holds the d for the haymarket martyr what do you think of the super pac and the decision by the obama administration to get into it with the you know you talked about lobbying and now they've made the decision to enter that fight well it's obviously a sell out but of any principle not the first one incidentally on the other hand you know there is an institutional effect that political figures just have to live with the structure of election the electoral system has been shredded i mean it always was under the effect of there was always a big effect of campaign spending and if you want to learn about it the best work that's done is by a political economist named thomas ferguson's personal friend but he's he has a book called golden rule which goes back a century this is studying in detail the effect of campaign spending not only on who's elected but on what their programs are it goes right through the new deal right up to the present he's since extended it since and i think it's pretty convincing it's what he calls the investment theory of politics it treats elections as occasions in which groups of investors coalesce to invest to control the state campaign funding is one standard mechanism and you know it doesn't explain everything to pretend that it does but it explains quite a lot now that's changed radically in the last 30 years the last 30 years part of this whole basically neoliberal assault on democracy and justice and that's what it is it's worldwide but here too a part of it has just been the sharply rising cost of elections and and now since especially since citizens united and the super pacs it's gone through the roof but it's been going up steadily and it has a very definite effect it forces political figures into the pockets of those who have the money the private corporate sector it's increasingly financial institutions but incidentally that's not only true of you know the president running for office or congress running for office it's even permeated the congress i mean it used to be the case that if positions of some you know some authority or prestige in congress say chair of an important committee that used to be the result of seniority and service by now literally you have to buy it you have to pay money into the party coffers in order to qualify for a chair of a committee well you can guess what the effects of that are obviously and this has been enormously changed by citizens united and the super pacs but it's a process that's always been there actually you go back a century there was a great famous campaign financier the most famous of the era mark hannah he was once asked what are the important things in politics and his answer was he said well i can think of three things that are important the first one is money the second one is money and i've forgotten what the third one is that was over a century ago and it's gotten a lot more extreme so yeah this is a sellout on obama's part but if he wants to run in a multi-billion dollar election you don't have a lot of choices it's the system that's rotten at the core not the choices of individuals your question thank you professor chomsky i'm a student from south korea and then thank you a lot for you writing for village of guangzhou in jeju island it suffers a lot from the like military-based construction but like i just want you to know your opinion about the tax expenditures on the military expenditure instead of education instead for instance like korean students are suffering a lot from actually increasing like tuition almost we are heading towards the same way american students been then like but still their government is spending lots of money on the military instead of like educating people and for better humanity yeah actually that jeju island construction that you mentioned is something very significant we ought to know about it it's jeju island is quite significant for korea it was the site of a huge massacre in 1948 by the u.s backed mostly basically fascist state and south korea horrible massacre and that the island is it's it's been actually designated i think by the u.n as an island of peace to trying to be an island of peace and the u.s and south korea are building and trying to build a major military-based major naval base on the island oriented towards china i think it's 500 kilometers from china approximately and it's part of the kind of encirclement of china which is called containment of china here it's described as protection of freedom of the seas the chinese see a little differently they they see it the way we would see it if the chinese navy was building bases in the caribbean say i wouldn't we'd blow them off the planet if they did that but the way the world is supposed to work we're supposed to be able to do it anywhere in fact if you read the professional literature and strategic analysis security studies they refer to the chinese american naval confrontation as a classic security dilemma each of the two sides thinks that there's an kind of an existential danger they just can't give it up it's too important so we think that it's an existential threat if the united states doesn't control all the oceans around china and they think it's an existential threat if we send nuclear armed you know super carriers into their territorial waters that's the security dilemma you know what can you do and in fact the u.s is trying hard to essentially encircle china so that they can't have access to the pacific or to the moloch straits where a lot of trade goes and so on japan is part of this system japan's a client state there's military bases all over japan many of them on okinawa this is over the strong objections of the people of okinawa who've been trying to get those bases off for 60 years and i can't do it recently the u.s basically forced the japanese prime minister out of office because he was thinking about it well jeju island and south korea is another case so that's and it's really serious an important issue there's a lot of protest on the island civil disobedience a lot of arrests usual violence and so on but your general point is quite right i mean the vast military expenditures are part of the you know i don't think the main reason like we had fast military expenditures in the 50s and still was pretty almost free education and for a gi bill totally free and huge amounts of money going to the research system and so on and now it's a it's a burden undoubtedly but i don't the society has to depend decide where you want to spend your money you want to spend it on classic security dilemmas in the china's territorial waters with all that that could lead to building naval bases on jeju island on okinawa and so on or do you want to spend it building a decent society and this this question arises all across the board i mean one of the most striking cases is it doesn't involve the education but it does involve survival is a canadian at tar sands and shale oil in throughout the country and obama's state of the nation address if you read it carefully one of the things he said was that we're now coming to a position where we can have a hundred years of energy independence by exploiting you know using high technology techniques and fracking and so on to get previously inaccessible and incidentally very dirty oil with all sorts of environmental local environmental consequences and this is all over there was a recent speech by the president of the chamber of commerce maine business lobby forgot it thomas corker and i think you can find it in the internet this is annual speech to the business world and the first point that he mentions the most important point is that we can now move to he says several centuries of energy independence by just tapping our own oil you go to the most responsible and serious newspaper in the world that i know of the london financial times they devote a whole full page to a euphoric description of the possibility of the united states having a century of energy independence and a century of global hegemony by tapping these resources there's only one small footnote if we use those resources we're finished you know there's no future for your children and your grandchildren that's not discussed uh you gotta gain wealth for getting old itself and that means my profits tomorrow not what happens 30 years from now to my grandchildren and that's you know there are alternatives like ultimately probably solar energy is going to be the main alternative and it's quite striking to see what's happening to the solar energy industry that by now about half the world's social solar panels are being produced in china now that's not cheap labor it's not a labor intensive industry they started the way all manufacturing starts very low level manufacturing manufacturing provides the incentive the ideas the design conceptions and so on that lead to technological advances very common and slowly they've been not so slowly they've been moving up the high technology ladder they're now producing the most advanced solar cells in the world well okay that's one way to use your resources we have choices we have plenty of choices because we're a very rich society china is a very poor society we're a very rich one so we have plenty of options we have about 10 minutes left so thank you so much for keeping your questions short so we can get through as many that means i should keep my answers true i got it you're the guest of honor you can answer as long as you like uh hello dr chomsky i'm a member of needles and our question is [Applause] in your opinion what are the larger implications of the decision by the tusd governing board and state superintendent john hupatal to ban mexican american well studies think it's it's a particularly ugly part of the whole attack on anything like the enlightenment ideal of education in this case to destroy the diversity uh richness of the uh educational system and meaningfulness for students and so on for a large number of students you know after all big mexican community so i think it's just part of the general attack on a free and creative education that stimulates learning discovery uh you know enriching one's life and so on uh and it's you know and trying to impose indoctrination and conformity a particularly ugly case right here because of where it's happening would be ugly anywhere but it's particularly so right here thank you back to this side professor chomsky i i believe i speak on behalf of almost everyone here it's an absolute humbling honor to be learning from you in person thank you [Applause] i'm an iranian-american peace and human rights and environmental activist and i'm a participant in the iran's green movement a supporter of the arab spring movements against the mock against dictatorship and obviously i'm a passionate participant in the occupy movement in this country which i believe has already awakened incredible energy and therefore um i am hopeful but also fearful of what it may do wrong in order to possibly waste this last chance movement so please share with us your wisdom about what is it that you think at this point in history the occupied movement needs to be wary of or be careful about well like you i think the occupy movement has been quite a remarkable success way beyond what i thought and the tactic has been very effective for a lot of reasons uh one effect that it's had is just changing kind of national discourse in fact even the terminology and imagery of the occupy movement is now sort of mainstream it's focused attention on serious problems inequality like somebody asked before the purchase of elections shredding of democracy the extraordinary power of financial institutions which probably contribute very little if anything to the economy in fact the the leading the most respected financial commentator in the world i think martin wolf of the financial times in london is very conservative highly respected correspondent he describes the financial institutions that have developed in the last 30 years as a kind of like a larva that destroys the host in which it's embedded i couldn't get away with saying that but he can't you know and i can get away with quoting it but the and the occupy movement has directed attention to foreclosures you know homelessness a lot of problems that are there but we're kind of buried another major contribution it's made in my opinion is just overcoming the atomization of the society that people in the united states are very atomized society people are kind of alone you know the ideal uh social unit from the point of view of concentrated power is dyad you know you and the screen but nothing else that's a way to make sure that everybody's conforming and there's a lot of that you know children you know it's it's a it's a it's a real disease a pathology and the occupy movement's overcoming it it's creating spontaneously communities of people who actually are reviving traditional ideals i mean if there were any real conservatives in the country they'd be applauding the fact that they're reviving the concepts of solidarity mutual support sympathy uh free discussion and so on that are just the most traditional values we have there's been major efforts to destroy them and that's being revived in the communities of mutual support and solidarity that are being created well all of this is really important i think but now where do you go from here well in general first of all i don't regard myself as any kind of a expert on tactics i've been wrong so many times on tactical judgments that i usually shut up but uh but but and these are important judgments the tactical judgments are those that have direct human consequences so they're not marginal uh but i feel my general feeling is that tactics have a kind of a half-life you know they have diminishing returns they may be very successful but it sort of declines after a while the tactic come there's kind of a dynamism in which the tactic begins to relate to overcome the purpose apart from beginning to alienate other people who you're trying to reach so while i think that the occupied tactic has been a great success i think it has to be rethought and moves have to be made somehow to reach out into larger communities that's been going on in a number of interesting ways like one of the developments in several cities i know in new york in boston elsewhere has been what's been called occupy the hood neighborhood occupy movements which is to some extent integrated with the you know the ones that make the newspapers uh occupy wall street's occupier neighborhood in brooklyn uh occupy other things and those deal with the immediate problems of the local people and they can be very serious i mean it can be something as sounds as simple as getting a traffic light where kids have to cross the street i mean if people can achieve that they learn you can achieve something by mutual aid and you can go on that's what successful organizing is about and if the occupy movements can go in that direction reach out to larger sections of the population and engage the uh the working class which i have yet really to do that's very significant then i think they have great prospects but it's not easy to do there's going to be a lot of repression you know violent repression sometimes and power systems don't fade away cheerfully you know they'll do what they can to control things but i think that david hume was correct power is in the hands of the governed and there's nothing there's no weapon that the powerful have other than control of opinion attitudes opinions beliefs if they can make people feel hopeless dependent passive atomized okay then you can keep power but the governed that is the 99 in the imagery of the occupy movement they have the power but you have to have to get organized committed and that's the task of people who want to devote themselves to this we have time for one final question it will come from this side um hi dr chomsky i met you first with daniel bergen a long time ago but anyway uh getting back to your specific uh expertise in linguistics uh it's been troublesome to me that the media will use words like uh socialism class warfare but we never hear fascism and from my studies of ideology uh state-supported capitalism pretty much what we've been taught or what you've been talking about is fascism i know words have power and you know that too is are we too shy to talk about what basically almost brought the end of mankind in the last century or is it just the media controls and you have to go to link tv or democracy now or i don't know but they are not supported they have to be supported by people donating to them isn't anyone aware of well the history of that word is kind of interesting uh fascism obviously took on bad connotations in the 1940s but if you go back and instantly the same is true of other words like take propaganda the term propaganda now is not used for information in english it still is in other languages if you go back to the 1920s information was just called propaganda like edward bruneis who i mentioned the founder of the public relations industry the book of his from which i was quoting on engineering of consent and controlling the masses and so on is called propaganda propaganda is just what you do when you try to control beliefs and attitudes well since the 1930s and the 40s you can't use that term anymore for its obvious connotations fascism is a very interesting one and we can learn a lot about ourselves from looking at its history before the second world war before the united states got into the second world war 1941. fascism was not regarded particularly critically in fact there's a very important book i'd urge you to read if you haven't called the business as a system of power by one of the great political economists robert brady veblenite economist it's about the spread of fascism through the industrial world he points out that in every country all the industrial countries there are developments of basically fascist character and he discusses them and it's perfectly understandable it was quite right in fact different there's nothing inherent in fascism that says you have to have gas chambers that's a special thing that developed and in fact say mussolini's fascism was very highly regarded in the united states remember that's pre-nazi so fdr franklin road president roosevelt he described mussolini as that admirable italian gentleman i mean as late as 1939 he was praising mussolini saying well he's been kind of misled by hitler but basically doing the right thing in when fascism was instituted in italy and it was pretty ugly it was praised across the board in the united states a business investment shot up it also did after hitler came in uh there was a fortune magazine the main business journal had an issue in i think 1932 the title you look at the front page cover the big letters it says the whops are unwhopping themselves i mean the whops are finally doing something right you know they've got a fascist government which works and we like that people on the left were praising it uh the same same with nazism i mean as late as 1938 uh roosevelt's main advisor sumner wells went to the munich conference that's the conference which tore up czechoslovakia he came back full of praise for the nazi moderates who are going to help us usher in a new era of peace they're the moderates you know kind of protecting civilized values from the extremists of the right and left and so on i mean george cannon who's very much honored and respected now there's a major biography that just came out full of praise if you take a look at his actual record he was the american consul in berlin right through 1941 he was withdrawn pearl harbor and he was sending back uh diplomatic correspondence to washington saying you shouldn't be so hard on the nazis they're doing some things wrong but basically uh we can do business with them the right kind of people uh well a couple years later you couldn't talk about fascism that way the fascism meant uh crematorium you know gas chambers and so on so you stop using the word but your point is correct as a social and political order robert brady knew what he was talking about there are elements of this kind of state capitalist order all over the industrial world taking different forms thank you for all of your questions and for your attention [Music] you

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Keywords: University of Arizona, College of SBS, UA College of Social & Behavioral Sciences, Noam Chomsky, Arizona Public Media, Education, High Education, Chomsky

Id: 2p9aKa08cRI

Length: 119min 28sec (7168 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2021