Noam Chomsky discusses the purpose of education, impact of technology, whether education should be perceived as a cost or an investment and the value of standardised assessment.
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Transcript
Purpose of education
We can ask ourselves what the purpose of an educational system is, and
of course there are sharp differences on this matter. There is the
traditional interpretation that comes from the Enlightenment, which
holds that the highest goal in life is to inquire and create, to search
the riches of the past, try to internalize the parts of them that are
significant to you, that carry that quest for understanding further in
your own way. The purpose of education from that point of view is just
to help people determine how to learn on their own. It’s you, the
learner, who is going to achieve in the course of education, and it is
really up to you what you'll master, where you’ll go, how you'll use it,
how you’ll go on to produce something new and exciting for yourself,
maybe for others. That’s one concept of education.
The other concept is essentially indoctrination. People have the idea
that from childhood, young people have to be placed into a framework in
which they’ll follow orders, accept existing frameworks, and not
challenge and so on, and this is often quite explicit. So for example,
after the activism of the 1960s, there was great concern across much of
the educated spectrum that young people were just getting too free and
independent, that the country was becoming too democratic and so on, and
in fact, there is an important study on what’s called the crisis of
democracy, too much democracy, arguing that, claiming that there are
certain institutions that are responsible for the indoctrination of the
young—that’s their phrase—and they are not doing their job properly,
that’s schools, universities, churches. We have to change them so that
they carry out the job of indoctrination and control more effectively.
That’s actually coming from the liberal internationalist end of the
spectrum of educated opinion, and in fact, since that time, there have
been many measures taken to try to turn the educational system towards
more control, more indoctrination, more vocational training, imposing a
debt which traps students, young people, into a life of conformity and
so on. That’s the exact opposite of what I referred to as the tradition
that comes out of the Enlightenment, and there’s a constant struggle
between those, in the colleges, in the schools. In the schools, do you
train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry, pursuing
interests that are aroused by material that is presented and that you
want to pursue either on your own or in cooperation with others? And
this goes all the way through up to graduate school and research. It’s
just two different ways of looking at the world.
When you get to, say, a research institution, like the one we’re now in,
at the graduate level it essentially follows the Enlightenment
tradition—in fact, science couldn’t progress unless it was based on
inculcation of the urge to challenge, to question doctrine, question
authority, the search for alternatives, use your imagination, act freely
under your own impulses, cooperative work with others is constant as
you can see just by walking down the halls. That’s my view of what an
educational system should be like, down to kindergarten. But there
certainly are powerful structures in the society which would prefer
people to be indoctrinated, conform, not ask too many questions, be
obedient, fulfill the roles that are assigned to you, and don’t try to
shake systems of power and authority. Those are choices we have to
make, either as people, wherever we stand in the educational system—as
students, as teachers, as people in the outside trying to help shape it
in the directions we think it ought to go.
Impact of technology
Well, there certainly has been a very substantial growth in new
technology—technology of communication, information, access,
interchange—it’s truly a major change in the nature and the culture and
society. We should bear in mind that the technological changes that are
taking place now, while they’re significant, probably come nowhere near
having as much impact as technological advances of say, a century ago,
plus or minus. So the shift—let’s take just communication—the shift
from a typewriter to a computer or a telephone to the email is
significant, but it doesn’t begin to compare with the shift from a
sailing vessel to a telegraph—the time that that cut down in
communication between, say, England and the United States was
extraordinary as compared with the changes taking place now. And the
same is true of other kinds of technology, like introduction of, say,
plumbing, widespread plumbing in the cities had a huge effect on health,
much more than the discovery of antibiotics. So the changes are real
and significant but we should recognize that others have taken place
which in many ways are more dramatic.
As far as the technology itself and education is concerned, technology
is basically neutral. It’s kind of like a hammer; the hammer doesn’t
care whether you use it to build a house or whether a torturer uses it
to crush somebody’s skull. A hammer can do either. Same with the
modern technology, say, the internet. The internet is extremely
valuable if you know what you’re looking for. I use it all the time for
research; I’m sure everyone does. If you know what you’re looking for,
you have a kind of a framework of understanding which directs you to
particular things and lets you sideline lots of others, then this can be
a very valuable tool. Of course, you always have to be willing to ask,
is my framework the right one? Maybe I ought to modify it, maybe if
there’s something I look at that questions it, I should rethink how I’m
looking at things. But you can’t pursue any kind of inquiry without a
pretty, relatively clear framework that’s directing your search and
helping you choose what’s significant and what isn’t, what can be put
aside, what ought to be pursued, what ought to be challenged, what ought
to be developed, and so on. You can’t expect somebody to become a
biologist by giving them access to the Harvard University biology
library and say just, Look through it. That will give them nothing.
And the internet is the same except magnified enormously. If you don’t
understand or know what you’re looking for, if you don’t have some kind
of a conception of what matters—always of course with the proviso that
you’re willing to question it if it seems to be going in the wrong
direction—if you don’t have that, exploring the internet is just picking
out random factoids that don’t mean anything.
So, behind any significant use of contemporary technology—the internet,
communication systems, graphics, whatever it may be—unless behind it is
some well-constructed, directive, conceptual apparatus, it is very
unlikely to be helpful, it may turn out to be harmful. For example, a
random exploration through the internet turns out to be a cult
generator—you pick out a factoid here and a factoid there, and somebody
else reinforces it, and all of a sudden you have some crazed picture
which has some factual basis but nothing to do with the world. You have
to know how to evaluate, interpret, and understand. In, say, biology
again, the person who wins the Nobel Prize in biology is not the person
who read the most journal articles and took the most notes on them; it’s
the person who most knew what to look for. And cultivating that
capacity to seek what’s significant, always willing to question whether
you’re on the right track, that’s what education is going to be about,
whether it’s using computers and the internet or pencil and paper and
books.
Cost or investment
Education is discussed in terms of whether it’s a worthwhile investment,
and does it create human capital that can be used for economic growth
and so on. That’s a very strange, a kind of a very distorting way to
even pose the question, I think. Do we want to have a society of free,
creative, independent individuals, able to appreciate and gain from the
cultural achievements of the past and to add to them? Do we want that,
or do we want people who can increase GDP? They’re not necessarily the
same, they’re not the same thing. And an education of the kind that,
say, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and others talked about—that’s a
value in itself. Whatever impact it has on society, it’s a value
because it helps create better human beings. After all, that’s what an
educational system should be for.
On the other hand, if you want to look at it in terms of costs and
benefits, take the new technology that we were just talking about,
where’d that come from? Well, actually, a lot of it was developed right
where we’re sitting. Down below where we now are was a major
laboratory back in the 1950s, where I was employed in fact, which had
lots of scientists, engineers, people of all kinds of interests,
philosophers, others, who were working on developing the basic character
of the, and even the basic tools of the technology that is now common.
Computers and the internet, for example, were pretty much in the public
sector for decades, funded in places like this, where people were
exploring new possibilities that were mostly unthought of, unheard of at
the time. Some of them worked, some didn’t. The ones that worked were
finally converted into tools that people can use.
That’s the way scientific progress takes place; it’s the way cultural
progress takes place generally. Classical artists, for example, came
out of a tradition of craftsmanship that was developed over long periods
with master artisans, with others, and sometimes you can rise on their
shoulders and create new marvelous things. But it doesn’t come from
nowhere. If there isn’t a lively cultural and educational system which
is geared towards encouraging creative exploration, independence of
thought, willingness to cross frontiers, to challenge accepted beliefs
and so on—if you don’t have that, you’re not going to get the technology
that can lead to economic gains, though that, I don’t think, is the
prime purpose of cultural enrichment and education as part of it.
Assessment v. autonomy
There is, in the recent period particularly, an increasing shaping of
education from the early ages on, towards passing examinations. That
can be—taking tests can be of some use, both for the person who’s taking
the test, to see what I know and where I am and what I haven’t, and for
instructors, what should be changed and improved in developing the
course of instruction. But beyond that, they don’t really tell you very
much. I mean, I know for many many years, I was on, I’ve been on
admissions committees for entry into an advanced graduate program, maybe
one of the most advanced anywhere, and we of course pay some attention
to test results, but really not too much. I mean, a person can do
magnificently on every test and understand very little. All of us
who’ve been through schools and colleges and universities are very
familiar with this. You can be assigned—you can be in some course you
have no interest in, and there’s demand that you pass a test, and you
can study hard for the test, and you can ace it, to use the idiom, do
fine, and a couple of weeks later you forgot what the topic was. I’m
sure we’ve all had that experience; I know I have.
It can be a useful device if it contributes to the constructive purposes
of education. If it’s just a set of hurdles you have to cross, it can
turn out to be not only meaningless, but it can divert you away from
things you ought to be doing. Actually, I see this regularly when I
talk to teachers. Just to give you one experience from a couple of
weeks ago, there’s plenty like it, I happened to be talking to a group
which included many schoolteachers. One of them was a sixth-grade
teacher, teaches kids that are ten or eleven, eleven or twelve,
something like that. She came up to me afterwards, and I’d been talking
about these things, and she told me of an experience that she had just
had in her class. After one of the classes, a little girl came up to
her and said she was really interested in something that came up and she
asked how she could—could the teacher give her some ideas about how to
look into it further. And the teacher was compelled to tell her, I’m
sorry, but you can’t do that, you have to study to pass this national
exam that’s coming. That’s going to determine your future—the teacher
didn’t say it, but that’s going to determine my future, like whether I’m
rehired and so on. The system is geared toward getting the children to
pass hurdles, but not to learn and understand and explore. Now, that
child would have been better off if she had been allowed to explore what
she was interested in, and maybe not do so well on the test about
things she wasn’t interested in, and that will come along when they fit
into her interests and concerns.
And so a test—I don’t say that tests should be eliminated; they can be a
useful educational tool, but ancillary, something that’s just helping
improve, for ourselves, for instructor, and others, what we’re doing,
and tell us where we ought to be moving. But passing tests doesn’t
begin to compare with searching and inquiring and pursuing topics that
engage us and excite us; that’s far more significant than passing tests.
And in fact if that’s the kind of educational career that you’re given
the opportunity to pursue, you will remember what you discovered.
There’s a famous physicist, a world-famous physicist, right here at MIT,
who, like a lot of the senior faculty, was teaching freshman courses—he
once said that in his freshman course, students will ask, “What are
going to cover this semester?” and his standard answer was, “It doesn’t
matter what we cover. It matters what you discover.” And that’s right.
Teaching ought to be inspiring students to discover on their own. To
challenge if they don’t agree. To look for alternatives if they think
there are better ones. To work through the great achievements of the
past and try to master them on their own because they’re interested in
it. If that’s the way teaching is done, students will really gain from
it and not only remember what they studied, but will be able to use it
as a basis for going on on their own. And again, education is really
aimed at just helping students get to the point where they can learn on
their own. Because that’s what you’re going to do for your life, not
just absorb materials that are given to you from the outside and repeat
it.
