Professor Chomsky Interview: Reflections on Education and Creativity

well the first thing I just wanted to start off with is when I decided to email you which was purely random I was at a coffee shop and and I heard that you had a kind of strange habit of responding to email is very strange so I actually did it as a writing exercise in a way I wasn't you know thinking that you were actually being right back and the question was whether or not brave new world or or was 1984 which one of those was either a better book to teach or a better kind of prophecy or prediction of where we were guess what I might have did I mentioned some yeah exactly yeah cuz I think that's much better than either oh yeah so what was your what's your reasoning for anything it's much earlier right but I just thought it was more perceptive right I mean first of all I didn't think that 1984 was one of our wills right just what a terrific I'd barely finish it I thought it was kind of obvious and wouldn't you know you know where it's going yeah I had some nice comments about Newspeak and this rant that was good useful phrases but I didn't think was much of a book and Huxley's is you know it's science fiction basically but some yatin was talking about the real world Russia of course it wasn't and in the early post-revolutionary period and he was discussing I think he sensed what a tellurian system is like and it's a projection you know but the projection from something real or well had in mind he probably had in mind England and England social democracy which he thought was going off in a dangerous direction but it's quite a projection and anyhow that's but it's just reading it and see what you think grateful I frankly I read it about 60 years ago I'm not I can't reproduce it but I know I was impressed but so I guess just a very basic question before I get to some other you know topical issues is I'm here I am from LA I just kind of sent you an email I'm interested in and why you make time for I don't wanna say folks like me but what you know it is about you're kind of whether or not it's a philosophy or just kind of who you are or you're very open to people speaking with you given your schedule and given you know other things to say oh no I mean I'm not teaching anymore but I was the same when I was teaching I I taught my my work professional English tics class grad grad courses but I also always taught undergraduate courses on my own time on the kinds of things I write about social political issues and they the students who took them couldn't you know they couldn't really get credit for a program through these courses weren't admitted into any program so they were taking it on their own I often taught them in the evenings and they're just open to the community and a lot of people would come year after year because they'd always talk about new thing right but I think that's part of part of one's and I would even say responsibility that makes it sound too August it's normal like why do you talk to your children you know well it's not that this was you only have two children what if you only asked your children if you only have two I have F 3 yeah but a lot of grandchildren right but I'll talk then they'll occasionally ask me a question but then they'll usually say something like just the five minute later please like don't go off you know but I mean you respond like I say responsibilities too fancy a word and it's just you're part of the human race something you think you've talked to people about that might be worthwhile so you do it why do I run around giving talks it's not the same thing be more convenient just to sit at home and work what teacher has made the biggest impact on you well out of a very unconventional education for the first till I was about 12 my parents were Hebrew teachers so they did they worked in the afternoons you know teach and so it and they sent me to experimental kind of a dewy-eyed school run by Temple University and I was there from two years old till high school and it wasn't quite what you're describing but it was a pretty open school that's foster creativity independence you didn't take two you only took tests but it was didn't mean much like just to give you an example I didn't know I was a good student until I got to high school literally I mean I knew I had skipped a year but all that meant was I was the smallest kid in the class nobody paid any attention to it when I got to high school and I discovered he's supposed to you know be first in your class and you have to pass all the exams but it wasn't enough we've never had anything like that you just did work you were interested in you worked with other people and there was a curriculum normal curriculum but it was guided you know but so the teachers from there I remember actually but after that was one professor at the University a couple of people at the University zelich Harrison oh if you know him who is very a kind of charismatic person actually my context of them were political I mean I see erratically I was in his department right Godfrey didn't take many courses and I was I was just about to drop out of college when I met him because it was so boring but he suggested I take his grad courses and then start taking other graduate courses and I came in contact with intellectually very interesting people but what qualities did he have as a teacher that you really responded isn't a teacher you know like our classes would be there were a couple of students that he the kind of work close to them maybe half a dozen we'd meet in his apartment or his apartment in New York this is Philadelphia and talk about politics science all kind of things and he was a you know it was a kind of a intellectual leader you know he a lot of interesting ideas people are interested but one classes and I took classes with people like Nelson Goodman a very fine philosopher but he had just discussed his own work and we thought about it and we argued about it and discussed it and went off on her own but actually I mean one of the I was taking graduate math classes I'd never had undergraduate math but the there was one professor who I thought was a fantastic eita that is just the right way he advanced real numbers or something every what it was he'd come into class and the blackboard cleared the blackboard and write down something which and he'd look at it kind of puzzled and you say well let's figure out if that's a theorem and then the class would and we'd read stuff and studied stuff and ideas would come up and sometimes they were good learning sometimes they weren't he'd kind of steered the discussion and by the end of the class we'd have either proven that they were disproven right yeah okay you learn something that way but I thought it's terrific way to teach he doesn't even know his multiplication table or generations of us youngsters went to school because they had to and both communities boasted but one room and a single teacher with which to educate their entire and disordered progeny good night children happiest moment for the school children of that sterner era was when school let out but for some youngsters staying after school seemed almost unavoidable yesterday found only a half-dozen advanced experimental school today in tens of thousands of public schools from Santa Monica California to Bronxville New York progressive education is important learning by doing learning about practical everyday problem that knowledge gained during an actual experience is best understood and longest retain reading Dewey because our school I think in May is a Dewey at school although you know in practice not always and in you know experience in education he links education with you know experience and memory so is it does it surprise you that you recall so much more from your educational experiences that involved experience and you didn't know because it was exciting and you were doing things you were interested in I mean look everyone of us knows if we got through college you know you can take a course and you're not interested in then you have to pass an exam you don't care one way or another and you memorize what you have to memorize and you get an A in the exam and a week later it can't remember what the course was about in fact there's an image in the Enlightenment there's two competing images during the Enlightenment about education one of them is education is like pouring water into a vessel which is happens to be very leaky vessel that's the take exam and forget what it was the case the other is comes actually from the guy who was the founder of the modern higher education system film phenom bolt humanistic he said education is like laying out a string along which the student progresses and students progress in their own ways but you've got the string in other words there's a structure to what being students being interesting introduced into it's not like any random thing but then they explore it and create in their own ways that when you get to a place like MIT you know science university it's almost second nature like the famous physicists euros world famous physicist was teaching his freshman courses he he was famous for saying that if students asked him what are we going to cover this semester you say it really doesn't matter matters what you discover and I cannot move any further back so there's no cheat here I'm going to release it right for my chin here you realize as you have just seen that the slightest push and this will be my last lecture I'm going to close my eyes I don't want to see it and I'm going to count down from three to zero three two one zero I'm Noam Chomsky I'm a on the faculty at MIT and I've been getting more and more heavily involved in anti-war activities for the last few years when was the first time that you ever expressed dissent in a classroom setting like in a formal school setting where you didn't just kind of internalized your frustration you actually said something I don't know I remember like in the history courses you know in the latin course I just study Latin but in the history of course we were being taught stuff their thought was off the wall and I was in high school high school right yeah I mean in elementary school you just talk but sorry I said some things but it was obviously just couldn't there was no point you know it couldn't it was like talking to the wall you know you can couldn't penetrate too much so if I never bothered I did it outside of class I mean all radicals outside of class but never thought you mentioned that in formal schooling had a huge impact on you and this is both your experiences in New York visiting these bookstores as a youngster this is kind of the accidental nature of your your own career and you know do educators undervalue the importance of informal schooling or maybe overvalue traditional schooling I think that listen I mean in my own experiment I was a Heber teacher to teaching 10 year old 12 year old kids and we taught the same way it was a duet framework so we would the way to teach the kids was get them interested in middle school Hebrew school is one of those challenging it is because for one thing the kids don't want to come in the afternoon and they'd rather be playing somewhere and and middle school is a difficult age anyway but this it worked you know most of the kids got interested and studied initiative pursued things on their own but you had to set things up so they get interested in it like it often this class would start with games again games that you would create yeah or that we're part of the edge kind of educational program that actually both my mother and father who kind of ran the school systems were due eight deeply committed do educators so they had all kind of suggestions and frameworks as to how to pursue and then we did our own way but games that involved learning that they did involve learning language or learning customs or learning something else but in the form of something that kids wanted to solve puzzles and so on and they get interested in something you go on then you can do it at any level I so for example I have a my sister-in-law was a sixth grade teacher he wants to describe very good teacher actually very successful she told me how she taught a class on the American Revolution before a couple of weeks before the class was gonna be on this topic she started just doing things that were arbitrary and annoying like compelling the kids to do things they didn't want to do and it didn't make any sense got worse and worse and the kids got upset protesting and right finally when it got to the point where they were gonna be an uprising in the classroom she turned to the American Revolution and they were all ready for you know they'd figured out what it's about right all right okay that's something the kids will remember I think well it's true that our genetic program rigidly constrains us I think the more important point is that the existence of that rich of that rigid constraint is what provides the basis for our freedom and creativity and the reason I mean it's only because we have pre-programmed that we can do all things and exactly the point is that if we really were plastic organisms without an extensive pre-programming then the state that our mind achieves would in fact be a reflection of the environment which means it would be extraordinarily impoverished fortunately for us we're rigidly pre-programmed with extremely rich systems that are part of our biological endowment I want to just ask you about um structure and creativity so what I found most interesting about your work language is that you correlated you know creativity and the kind of infinite like potential of language the fact with the fact that it's restricted and I think you said it's precisely those characteristics of language that make it an effective instrument for free thought and expression seem to have their origins in this innately determined structure so I'm just wondering what this apparent paradox structure promoting creativity suggests about the nature of creative thought because it's normally associated maybe that's a misperception with an absence of structure and that's what creativity is so and how does that reflect itself in the classroom that's true that that's commonly so that can possibly be true I mean it's like it takes a the growth of an organism say an amoeba or a human being a human being has a a lot of complex capacities and characteristics even a complex internal structure like the way your digestive system works and so on I can do a lot of things but that's because we're designed within a framework that allows certain options and blocks others suppose that the genetic endowment said become anything okay so arbitrarily you'd end up some lump of something or other with no capacities and no ability to do anything it's the same with the arts no this was understood in classical aesthetics so if you read the aesthetic theories of the 8th 17th 18th century they understood that creativity presupposes a set of rules forms and rules if you you can you can challenge the rules and like it can be one form of creativity is challenging the rules if you have no structure and no rules at all it's you know it's like tossing paint at the wall right that's not not a creative act this is the value of dissonance well there's got to be some structure that provides you with capacities if you don't have internal structure this is for growth and development but he'd be the same for say creative activity is so what kind of structures support creativity and what kind of structures inhibit creativity structures that support it or take say writing a sonnet there are rules for sonnet okay that framework of rules enables people to do really creative work you know you read classical Sun instance if you had no rules at all you just then I could write poetry I can't and the structure that's there has to be or takes a painting here - it's been studying the history of art by Marsh Bureau and others a painting is in a frame well that alone imposes structure it's on a flat surface okay that requires you to invent perspective and a long time before people understood it how to make it look like a gown that's flowing you know okay that that frame itself just that simple even that simple frame already imposed this sets the conditions under which you can carry out creative acts in a loneliness in my life my father dead my mother dead my mother far away my sisters my wife far away nothing here with my own tragic hands that once we rotted by a world a sweet attention let's take like Jack Kerouac on the road that that's somehow less creative than like a doctor but first he did he had no rules he was just he but it's like not a motive he might thought he had no rules but if you look he did it's pretty structured and otherwise it's just been a random sentence that's going out and it was nothing like that it's hard to follow the buck anyway well I don't think it's random it's not you know free association right and if it was it would be of no interest right and there's development and plot and so on I'm even concepts like plot and development or an aesthetic framerate you don't want the framework to be so rigid that you always do the same thing like a detective story where Perry Mason strays everyone the same as the last one you don't want that but a framework which is rigid enough to meet to make it possible to carry out creative acts but doesn't inhibit the third eye well he's kind of like you're your elementary school experience which is teachers like that present information that might be worthwhile evaluating and allowing kids to independently you know or it's like this laying out the string model of Education there's got to be something there's got to be something there to work with and what's there should be challenging enough so you want to see what you can discover within that framework and then raise questions about the framework so just I I didn't intend to bring this up but if you take a look at the the AP system in high school which is I think it actually started in the Cold War as a way to kind of democratize education and give kind of inner-city students a chance to have this kind of high end education or this this elite education but here you know we take the brightest students in many ways but provide them the kind of narrowest of educational experiences and so but at the same time this is what is considered appropriate to enter science and tech science if there's an interesting series of editorials we might want to take a look at and about a year ago in science magazine near the Journal of the American Association for advancement of science the main science journal the editor Bruce Alberts has a series of editorials on science teaching which are very well done he's talking about California incidentally he is talking about how he testified before the California Education Commission on science education and every proposal of his was turned down but he wanted the he said he describes the teaching of science from kindergarten to graduate school as deadening any child's interest in science so when you you can memorize the periodic table okay you memorized it and so what you know why should I bother with a periodic table you can memorize the enzymes that do so-and-so okay I memorized them and finished that or they said they describe the way people study great moments like the discovery of DNA but they study it as it was after it's finished so okay here's the answer you know you lose all the right sense and then he gives suggestions estádio order teacher and the suggestions are pretty interesting so like this I remember he talks about a kindergarten program which he the proof of thought it was very good and the way it worked was these are five year old kids they each child in the class was given a dish which had on it in it much of objects shells pebbles seeds other things and then it had a task figure out which ones are the seeds so the first thing they did was have what they called a scientific conference kids got together and talked and figured out ways in which they could tell what was a seed and some bad ideas some good ideas and of course guidance you know but and pretty soon they got to experiments that they could carry out to determine which ones are seeds and finally at the end they figured out which ones were seeds at that point each kid was given a magnifying glass and the teacher cut the seed and opened it up and they looked in and they found the embryo and they saw what made it grow these kids learned something look like some of us some of our top students are the ones least able to take their knowledge and apply it in new situations and actually they frequently like laugh at themselves they call themselves Lab Rats because whenever we present something that didn't show up the day before either in class or wasn't spelled out in the form of instruction they have a ton of anxiety and I'm wondering you know we ranked number 17 in the world in education a recent study say we were that students in Latvia Chile and Brazil are making gains and academics three times fast an American students work 25th in math but our per pupil spending and the amount of money people spend on college counseling and everything that's surrounding kind of you know the test-taking culture a wheat we're number one is that because the way we're educating kids and at these exams I think actually are better reflections of whether what kids know than the SATs I think it's called the peas eggs well that's called teaching to test businesses disasters like for example in our admissions here you know we've pretty high admission you have to have high admission standards in a place like that because the number of applicants all of whom are pretty advanced is way beyond the number you can take right but we almost never paid attention to the graduate you know the SAT type things or even to it that were great I'm if a kid comes along got all A's he's probably too boring today bother with you know if we ask that a middle school English teacher you know seventh or eighth grade or maybe a ninth grade world literature teacher that we feel it's her responsibility but say she embraces her responsibility of taking students with a various level of literacy so you have a kid who doesn't speak English very well at all and a kid who's ready to read you know um you know you know Faulkner or James Joyce but we think you know students learn best when they're exposed to various learning styles and her responsibility to promote democracy in the classroom so I'm wondering whether or not and I don't mean this is like an extreme hypothetical whether you know MIT professor who teaches let's say molecular physics should also be responsible for teaching kids who haven't taken say basic precalculus or whether or not at that level it's already selected out and the kids that are in that class by the time you're at MIT it's pre-selected right but you you you have another life I mean this I know there are people and I think it's a good thing who give talks in high schools or classes in high schools it's inner-city schools and in fact this same famous physicist who I mentioned before he also wrote books for lay people you know introducing physics to people who really had no background in physics and did it very and that's another kind of you can't do it at inside a place like MIT because the priests elections dua but you have a you know you're him and being you have other things you can do with your life but do you think select a tracking and leveling in high school at any point is necessary or should classes always be this very broad democratic nice life can be a mix for example in a high school there could be a group of students who happen to have a passionate interest in mathematics okay they should have a right to be able to be in a class which is really pushing interesting questions in mathematics though their students aren't interested in me that doesn't nothing wrong with that what shouldn't be done is what I could see with my own children we were in a mostly professional suburb with so-called good schools and so on by the time I kids were in third grade they were ranking the other kids in the class as smart and dumb the smart ones were being tracked into the higher track and the dumb ones were being into the lower track and you know but the third graders you know why even have that concept in your head oh look I want to have a few questions but your bath has been very patient and he's getting me the hook but I wanted to thank you so much for taking the time and you're you're an inspiration really and it's I really appreciate it and you know I hope to talk to you sometime soon and hear more about what you're doing and good if we have a chance okay thank you so much you

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Length: 29min 47sec (1787 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 03 2013