By Sheldon

Over the weekend I ran across a very interesting interview with Noam Chomsky on the future of democracy and education in the 21st century. Chomsky is one of America’s leading intellectuals, but on matters of education he is particularly good. It’s not a long read, and it’s very much worth the time.

The interview includes a bit of history of American education, including some eye-openers about the Public Education system, which struggled between two competing tensions. One the one hand, the elite wanted public education to teach servility and obedience. The aim evolved into one aimed at turning independent people into workers in an industrial system. But on the other hand, the need for teaching literacy, math, a common heritage, civics, and the essentials of critical thinking–but not too much (although there have always been and–should be–calls for improvement in that area).

Chomsky then considers the kind of education we are seeing at the hands of so-called “reformers” with programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, corporate charter schools and so on, which use the worst possible paradigm for teaching. Chomsky notes:

“…teach to the test – worst possible way of teaching. But it is a disciplinary technique. Schools are designed to teach the test. You don’t have to worry about students thinking for themselves, challenging, raising questions. And you see it down to the lowest level of detail. I give a lot of talks in communities and places where people are concerned about education and I’ve had teachers come up to me and say afterwards, you know, I teach sixth grade. A little girl came up after class and said she was interested in something that came up in class, and wanted to know how to look into it. And I tell her, you can’t do it; you got to study for the test. Your future depends on it; my salary depends on it.”

You can’t learn to think or even learn much about anything that way.

This got me to thinking about the ancient Greek educational system. Those curious, intellectually insatiable Greeks had a different way of education that was actually unique in the ancient world. Education was a prerogative of the the wealthy; our word “school” comes from the Greek work for “leisure.” It worked like this: you start by spending the day listening to the smartest men in town sitting around holding forth, debating, and generally arguing about the Big Ideas. You’d soon find your own group for discussions, and gradually, if you were smart and paid attention, you’d reach a point where you could hold your own in debates with the local intellectual superstars. That was the ad hoc, “amateur” intellectual tradition that set the western intellectual agenda for the next 2,500 years.

When you think about it, that is also a fair description of Greek democracy; long discussions, loquacious oratory, debates among all the wealthy movers and shakers who had time to spend on civic matters and governance in the Assembly. It’s very easy to see how the one flows out of the other.

But this raises a troubling question: if western democracy grew out of Greek education, could the educational system promoted by the reformers and their allies give birth to a comparable form of democracy? If not, what would emerge from a new system? Given the regimentation, the distaste of independent thinking, measuring every last detail, and the large number of Wall-Street denizens and hedge fund investors who support these initiatives, it’s hard to imagine anything good coming of it. Chomsky considers a few of the larger implications:

“You can’t let teachers control the classroom. That’s teaching to test; then the teachers are disciplined. They do what you tell them. Their salaries depend on it; their jobs depend on it. They become sociopaths like everyone else. And you have a society where it’s only, “Look after me; I’ll forget everyone else.” And then they can get rid of Social Security and get rid of Medicare. And why should I pay for the kid across the street going to school; my kid is not going to school. Why should I care about disabled widows? Etcetera.”

One of the things that destroyed ancient Greek civilization was the rise of counterfeit education: the decline of learning, replaced by rhetoric for its own sake as preached by the Sophists. “Education” was about persuasion, manipulation, seeking political advantage and to hell with the facts. Today’s educational counterfeit is punitive at its root. It mistakes conformity and meaningless test scores for education. Incidentally, more and more evidence is emerging that the reformers’ snake oil is just that. See David Sirota’s well-titled essay “New Data Shows School “Reformers” are Full of It.”

There is a greater crime, however, perpetrated by these self-appointed soul engineers. It is the loss of learning and creativity as a source of enjoyment. Learning, propelled by curiosity and wonder, is one of life’s keenest pleasures. It really is true that the best thing for being sad is to learn something, and that knowing something for itself can be a source of joy. That is the great corruption of of our public intellectual landscape, that what was once wild and fertile would become an industrial wasteland.