Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (50 page)

W
OMAN
: All of Allan Bloom’s “great thoughts” are by elite white males
.

Yeah, okay—but it wouldn’t even matter if he had some different array of material, it really wouldn’t matter. The idea that there’s some array of “the deep thoughts,” and we smart people will pick them out and you dumb guys will learn them—or memorize them at least, because you don’t really learn them if they’re just forced on you—that’s nonsense. If you’re serious about, say, reading Plato,
  ¹⁰
it’s fine to read Plato—but you try to figure out what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s a better way of looking at it, why was he saying this when he should have been saying something else, what grotesque error of reasoning did he make over here, and so on and so forth. That’s the way you would read serious work, just like you would in the sciences. But you’re not supposed to read it that way here, you’re supposed to read it because it’s the truth, or it’s the great thoughts or something. And that’s kind of like the worst form of theology.

The point is, it doesn’t matter
what
you read, what matters is
how
you read it. Now, I don’t mean comic books, but there’s a lot of cultural wealth out there from all over the place, and to learn what it means for something to be culturally rich, you can explore almost anywhere: there’s no fixed subset that is the basis of truth and understanding. I mean, you can read the “Good Books,” and memorize what they said, and forget them a week later—if it doesn’t
mean
anything to you personally, you’d might as well not have read them. And it’s very hard to know what’s
going
to mean something to different people. But there’s plenty of exciting literature around in the world, and there’s absolutely no reason to believe that unless you’ve read the Greeks and Dante and so on, you’ve missed things—I mean, yeah, you’ve missed things, but you’ve also missed things if you haven’t learned something about other cultural traditions too.

Just take a look at philosophy, for example, which is a field that I know something about: some of the best, most exciting, most active philosophers in the contemporary world, people who’ve made a real impact on the field, couldn’t tell Plato from Aristotle, except for what they remember from some Freshman course they once took. Now, that’s not to say you shouldn’t read Plato and Aristotle—sure, there are millions of things you should read; nobody’s ever going to read more than a tiny fraction of the things you wished you knew. But just reading them does you no good: you only learn if the material is integrated into your own creative processes somehow, otherwise it just passes through your mind and disappears. And there’s nothing valuable about that—it has basically the effect of learning the catechism, or memorizing the Constitution or something like that.

Real education is about getting people involved in thinking for themselves—and that’s a tricky business to know how to do well, but clearly it requires that whatever it is you’re looking at has to somehow catch people’s interest and make them
want
to think, and make them
want
to pursue and explore. And just regurgitating “Good Books” is absolutely the worst way to do it—that’s just a way of turning people into automata. You may call that an education if you want, but it’s really the opposite of an education, which is why people like William Bennett [Reagan’s Secretary of Education] and Allan Bloom and these others are all so much in favor of it.

W
OMAN
: Are you saying that the real purpose of the universities and the schools is just to indoctrinate people—and really not much else?

Well, I’m not quite saying that. Like, I wouldn’t say that
no
meaningful work takes place in the schools, or that they only exist to provide manpower for the corporate system or something like that—these are very complex systems, after all. But the basic institutional role and function of the schools, and why they’re supported, is to provide an ideological service: there’s a real selection for obedience and conformity. And I think that process starts in kindergarten, actually.

Let me just tell you a personal story. My oldest, closest friend is a guy who came to the United States from Latvia when he was fifteen, fleeing from Hitler. He escaped to New York with his parents and went to George Washington High School, which in those days at least was the school for bright Jewish kids in New York City. And he once told me that the first thing that struck him about American schools was the fact that if he got a “C” in a course, nobody cared, but if he came to school three minutes late he was sent to the principal’s office—and that generalized. He realized that what it meant is, what’s valued here is the ability to work on an assembly line, even if it’s an intellectual assembly line. The important thing is to be able to obey orders, and to do what you’re told, and to be where you’re supposed to be. The values are, you’re going to be a factory worker somewhere—maybe they’ll call it a university—but you’re going to be following somebody else’s orders, and just doing your work in some prescribed way. And what matters is discipline, not figuring things out for yourself, or understanding things that interest you—those are kind of marginal: just make sure you meet the requirements of a factory.

Well, that’s pretty much what the schools are like, I think: they reward discipline and obedience, and they punish independence of mind. If you happen to be a little innovative, or maybe you forgot to come to school one day because you were reading a book or something, that’s a tragedy, that’s a crime—because you’re not supposed to think, you’re supposed to obey, and just proceed through the material in whatever way they require.

And in fact, most of the people who make it through the education system and get into the elite universities are able to do it because they’ve been willing to obey a lot of stupid orders for years and years—that’s the way I did it, for example. Like, you’re told by some stupid teacher, “Do this,” which you know makes no sense whatsoever, but you do it, and if you do it you get to the next rung, and then you obey the next order, and finally you work your way through and they give you your letters: an awful lot of education is like that, from the very beginning. Some people go along with it because they figure, “Okay, I’ll do any stupid thing that asshole says because I want to get ahead”; others do it because they’ve just internalized the values—but after a while, those two things tend to get sort of blurred. But you do it, or else you’re out: you ask too many questions and you’re going to get in trouble.

Now, there are also people who
don’t
go along—and they’re called “behavior problems,” or “unmotivated,” or things like that. Well, you don’t want to be too glib about it—there
are
children with behavior problems—but a lot of them are just independent-minded, or don’t like to conform, or just want to go their own way. And they get into trouble right from the very beginning, and are typically weeded out. I mean, I’ve taught young kids too, and the fact is there are always some who just don’t take your word for it. And the very unfortunate tendency is to try to beat them down, because they’re a pain in the neck. But what they ought to be is encouraged. Yeah: why take my word for it? Who the heck am I? Figure it out for yourself. That’s what real education would be
about
, in fact.

Actually, I happen to have been very lucky myself and gone to an experimental-progressive Deweyite school, from about the time I was age one-and-a-half to twelve [John Dewey was an American philosopher and educational reformer]. And there it was done routinely: children were encouraged to challenge everything, and you sort of worked on your own, you were supposed to think things through for yourself—it was a real experience. And it was quite a striking change when it ended and I had to go to the city high school, which was the pride of the city school system. It was the school for academically-oriented kids in Philadelphia—and it was the dumbest, most ridiculous place I’ve ever been, it was like falling into a black hole or something. For one thing, it was extremely competitive—because that’s one of the best ways of controlling people. So everybody was ranked, and you always knew exactly where you were: are you third in the class, or maybe did you move down to fourth? All of this stuff is put into people’s heads in various ways in the schools—that you’ve got to beat down the person next to you, and just look out for yourself. And there are all sorts of other things like that too.

But the point is, there’s nothing
necessary
about them in education. I know, because I went through an alternative to it—so it can certainly be done. But given the external power structure of the society in which they function now, the institutional role of the schools for the most part is just to train people for obedience and conformity, and to make them controllable and indoctrinated—and as long as the schools fulfill that role, they’ll be supported.

Now, of course, it doesn’t work a hundred percent—so you do get some people all the way through who don’t go along. And as I was saying, in the sciences at least, people have to be trained for creativity and disobedience—because there is no other way you can
do
science. But in the humanities and social sciences, and in fields like journalism and economics and so on, that’s much less true—there people have to be trained to be managers, and controllers, and to accept things, and not to question too much. So you really do get a very different kind of education. And people who break out of line are weeded out or beaten back in all kinds of ways.

I mean, it’s not very abstract: if you’re, say, a young person in college, or in journalism, or for that matter a fourth grader, and you have too much of an independent mind, there’s a whole variety of devices that will be used to deflect you from that error—and if you can’t be controlled, to marginalize or just eliminate you. In fourth grade, you’re a “behavior problem.” In college, you may be “irresponsible,” or “erratic,” or “not the right kind of student.” If you make it to the faculty, you’ll fail in what’s sometimes called “collegiality,” getting along with your colleagues. If you’re a young journalist and you’re pursuing stories that the people at the managerial level above you understand, either intuitively or explicitly, are not to be pursued, you can be sent off to work at the Police desk, and advised that you don’t have “proper standards of objectivity.” There’s a whole range of these techniques.

Now, we live in a free society, so you don’t get sent to gas chambers and they don’t send the death squads after you—as is commonly done, and not far from here, say in Mexico.
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But there are nevertheless quite successful devices, both subtle and extreme, to ensure that doctrinal correctness is not seriously infringed upon.

Subtler Methods of Control

Let me just start with some of the more subtle ways; I’ll give you an example. After I finished college, I went to this program at Harvard called the “Society of Fellows”—which is kind of this elite finishing school, where they teach you to be a Harvard or Yale professor, and to drink the right wine, and say the right things, and so on and so forth. I mean, you had all of the resources of Harvard available to you and your only responsibility was to show up at a dinner once a week, so it was great for just doing your work if you wanted to. But the real point of the whole thing was socialization: teaching the right values.

For instance, I remember there was a lot of anglophilia at Harvard at the time—you were supposed to wear British clothes, and pretend you spoke with a British accent, that sort of stuff. In fact, there were actually guys there who I thought were British, who had never been outside of the United States. If any of you have studied literature or history or something, you might recognize some of this, those are the places you usually find it. Well, somehow I managed to survive that, I don’t know how exactly—but most didn’t. And what I discovered is that a large part of education at the really elite institutions is simply refinement, teaching the social graces: what kind of clothes you should wear, how to drink port the right way, how to have polite conversation without talking about serious topics, but of course indicating that you
could
talk about serious topics if you were so vulgar as to actually do it, all kinds of things which an intellectual is supposed to know how to do. And that was really the main point of the program, I think.

Actually, there are much more important cases too—and they’re even more revealing about the role of the elite schools. For example, the 1930s were a period of major labor strife and labor struggle in the U.S., and it was scaring the daylights out of the whole business community here—because labor was finally winning the right to organize, and there were other legislative victories as well. And there were a lot of efforts to try to overcome this, but one of them was that Harvard introduced a “Trade Union Program.” What it did was to bring in rising young people in the labor movement—you know, the guy who looks like he’s going to be the Local president next year—and have them stay in dorms in the Business School, and put them through a whole socialization process, help them come to share some of the values and understandings of the elite, teach them that “Our job is to work together,” “We’re all in this together,” and so on and so forth. I mean, there are always two lines: for the public it’s, “We’re all in this together, management and labor are cooperating, joint enterprise, harmony” and so on—meanwhile business is fighting a vicious class war on the side. And that effort to socialize and integrate union activists—well, I’ve never measured its success, but I’m sure it was very successful. And the process was similar to what I experienced and saw a Harvard education to be myself.

Or let me tell you another story I heard about twenty years ago from a black civil rights activist who came up to study at Harvard Law School—it kind of illustrates some of the other pressures that are around. This guy gave a talk in which he described how the kids starting off at Harvard Law School come in with long hair and backpacks and social ideals, they’re all going to go into public service law to change the world and so on—that’s the first year. Around springtime, the recruiters come for the cushy summer jobs in the Wall Street law firms, and these students figure, “What the heck, I can put on a tie and a jacket and shave for one day, just because I need that money and why shouldn’t I have it?” So they put on the tie and the jacket for that one day, and they get the job, and then they go off for the summer—and when they come back in the fall, it’s ties, and jackets, and obedience, a shift of ideology. Sometimes it takes two years.