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Education Is a System of Indoctrination of the Young (1989) [video]

198 points by zainamro 7y ago

chmaynard 7y ago
Nice video! I'd like to know when and where Chomsky made these remarks. In fact, I'd like to watch the entire presentation. Strange that the captions are often incorrect -- did Chomsky review and approve them?
- zainamro 7y ago
  The video is an excerpt from a speech he made in 1989. Here's the full speech: https://youtu.be/G2dJ0iBhTcA?t=79 https://youtu.be/G2dJ0iBhTcA?t=79.
- topspin 7y ago
  > Strange that the captions are often incorrect The captions are GoogleYoutube automatic captioning of a 30 years old low-fi, badly clipped, slightly mumbled recording. Frequent errors are to be expected. You can turn them off by clicking the little "CC" button on the bottom right of the player because the captions are not actually part of the video. Safe to say Chomsky isn't reviewing or approving any of it.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mc32 7y ago
It most certainly is! If you listen to kids they will tell you their take on the environment, consumption, worthy causes, etc. I’m quite sure they’re not thinking about these things themselves. So yeah, teachers indoctrinate students with their biases. Some kids seek out their own information as they grow up, many don’t question it. So we end up in places where nuclear power was bad, for example, or banning straws (when there are much bigger issues with plastics) and detrimental things like everyone is special and unique and the future is yours to conquer (and of course this leads to disappointment when due to outsourcing and shipping jobs overseas they end up working at dead end minimum wage jobs).
- WalterBright 7y ago
  In my father's later years he was head of the business dept at a college. He taught classes in business and finance. He'd often have students come up to him and say they had no idea there was even a case for free markets. All they'd ever heard in school was how awful they were. They'd thank him for opening their eyes. At one time, the other staff (all socialists) invited him to participate in a debate about free markets in front of the students, and warned my father that they were going to take him apart. He happily agreed. They wound up rather sorry they'd done that. My father was an experienced debater, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of economics and history. He shredded them :-) and some had the class to come up later and thank him for opening their eyes as well, as they hadn't believed there was a case for free markets either.
  - Porthos9K 7y ago
    What kind of free markets are we talking about? Free as in corporations get to run amok, or free as in no corporations because the state doesn't have the authority to grant incorporation papers?
    - jstewartmobile 7y ago
      Carroll Quigley wrote frequently on how the modern concept of a corporation is one of an "immortal"--unlimited in both lifetime and scope of operations--and that bestowing such power on a group of individuals can only end badly. Of course, tell that to people who mostly work at and/or invest in corporations, and points will be burned. Thank you for your service.
      - Porthos9K 7y ago
        No worries. Points don't matter; getting more doesn't make my johnson bigger, nor does losing them diminish me. I still have six inches either way, and that's enough.
  - throwawayjava 7y ago
    And then everybody clapped.
Koshkin 7y ago
It is intended to be, but in reality it’s just a system that trains students to pass tests. For the most part, such system leaves students highly skeptical towards everything - which is a good thing.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  > it’s just a system that trains students to pass tests How do you verify that the students learned anything without some sort of tests?
  - Porthos9K 7y ago
    Why does it matter?
    - ben509 7y ago
      As a citizen, I have a civic obligation to hold the government accountable for the use of my tax dollars.
      - Porthos9K 7y ago
        In that case, you have more pressing concerns than the public schools, such as the military-industrial-congressional complex, corporate welfare, and a tax code that privileges rent-seeking over labor.
        ben509 7y ago
        Nonsense, besides the fact that I can look at more than one budget item at a time, education is one of the biggest[1], being between 20% and 40% of every state's budget. > ... and a tax code that privileges rent-seeking over labor. Education also has multiple lobbies that beside their own rent-seeking are indoctrinating young voters and more and more educators are engaging in partisan politics in the classroom. [1]: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/how-much-of-each-states-budget-goes-to-education https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/how-much-of-each-states-b...
remir 7y ago
I believe the most important thing we can teach kids is the ability to discern influences, at all time. Some are positive, and obviously some are negative. Everything exert an influence on us and it is crucial to be aware of it. People should be able to see the world with their own eyes, instead of with the eyes of culture or other socially transmitted concepts.
- godzillabrennus 7y ago
  Also important to teach children about biases. Some are healthy for quick decisions that yield positive returns. Some are established simply by cultural norms and are harmful to propagate further.
sn41 7y ago
Over time, I've come to realise that the most important gift we can give our children is formal training in critical thinking. I think STEM and such can wait. The ability to question narratives put forth by the industry, the government, media, political parties etc. is important not only to realise the truth at an abstract level, but also has practical implications on things such as successful investment strategies.
- chongli 7y ago
  Unfortunately, we don't really know how to do this. Longitudinal studies of critical thinking skills across 4 years of college show a modest improvement but there are caveats [1]. For one, the usual courses you'd expect to improve critical thinking (logic, philosophy, statistics) don't do very well. Going beyond what Scott discussed, I found this study [2] which seems to show that critical thinking skills are mostly correlated with verbal intelligence and trait openness. It's only one study though, so take it with a grain of salt. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/30/college-and-critical-thinking/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/30/college-and-critical-t... [2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1073191104263250 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/107319110426325...
  - StanislavPetrov 7y ago
    >Unfortunately, we don't really know how to do this. Can't say I agree, Socrates figured it out thousands of years ago! >Unfortunately, we don't really know how to do this. Longitudinal studies of critical thinking skills across 4 years of college show a modest improvement but there are caveats [1]. For one, the usual courses you'd expect to improve critical thinking (logic, philosophy, statistics) don't do very well. I'd argue that these courses are, at best, tangentially related to critical thinking. We need to teach the Socratic Method of learning to children from day 1, in all areas of study. Teaching children how to think and how to be intellectually curious is ultimately far more effective than our current methods if your desired result is an informed and intellectually capable populace.
    - chongli 7y ago
ben509 7y ago
In a very similar vein is Bryan Caplan's book "the Case Against Education." In an interview[1] he lays out his argument, roughly, as: > Right. So, the first story is called human capital, and just says that people with more education earn more money because they have been trained effectively for the jobs they are going to do. So, school--you go to school, and it gives you more skills; you make more money. Nice simple story. > The main story that I am pushing in the book is called signaling. This says that, yes, going to school does cause your earnings to go up; but, the reason isn't so much that you are learning useful skills as that you are getting certified. You are getting a stamp on your forehead saying, 'Great; hey, premium worker. Hire this person.' > And then, the last story is called ability bias. This one just says that it's just coincidental that people who have more education make more money; and rather, what's going on is it's the kind of thing that wealthy people--the people who are going to be wealthy--rather do. [1]: https://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-education/ https://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-ed...
- theLotusGambit 7y ago
  Funnily enough, The Case Against Education made me more comfortable with my place in the education system, because it gave me a better idea of what I'm actually accomplishing as a student. Definitely cleared up a fair bit of angst and resentment for me. I wish I had read it in high school, but better late than never.
- tasogare 7y ago
  > The main story that I am pushing in the book is called signaling I saw this idea a lot in other various threads. As the average HN poster is probably well educated, I wonder if it’s a biais coming from software engineering where most of the skill set is learnt by experience. Anyway, I have a long list of university degree, and I can tell there are indeed differences with autodidacts that learnt the same general fields. The fundamental difference is that university forces one to learn the unfunny parts. For computer science it means for example functional programming, database normal forms, language theory, anything with mathematics inside, etc. Of course, university classes alone are not enough and much like an autodidact much study have to be done alone, which might lead one to conclude that university is not required. But I don’t think it the case.
hi41 7y ago
I don’t agree with this. Because of the education I received at K-12 and undergrad studies, I was able to get a job. Without that I would not have been able to support my family. Also the K-12 educational systems across the world have lifted several billions out of poverty. Without educational system most people would be mired in ignorance and believing in myths.
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  > Without educational system most people would be mired in ignorance and believing in myths. Most people are mired in ignorance and believing in myths, despite having educational systems.
- adamnemecek 7y ago
  They are not against education, but against the educational system. > Also the K-12 educational systems across the world have lifted several billions out of poverty. No, that was education. Also, yes, maybe at some point school was useful, however a lot has changed since then however school really hasn't kept up.
- tryptophan 7y ago
  > K-12 educational systems across the world have lifted several billions out of poverty. You can just as easily say "countries spend more on education as they become richer". The correlation goes both ways (and thats all it is, a correlation. Beware those who assume causation!). I think its a little absurd to think that teaching geometry and Shakespeare to kids somehow will magically lift them all out of poverty.
euske 7y ago
I just found that this OP and the other two HN articles I've stumbled on today are somehow related at a deeper level - they're all talking about the creativity and intelligence in general. The Lesson to Unlearn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21729619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21729619 Brain tunes itself to criticality, maximizing information processing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21729211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21729211 I don't think all individuals should become a 100% creative/original person. That would make the society very unstable. So we need some (actually, a lot of) obedient people that makes the society keep going, in this regard that I think the current education is useful. On the other hand, there's always a rebel no matter how hard we try to cast people into a form. The question is that the society needs a good mixture of creative and boring people and I don't know how we can achieve that. My theory right now is the society is somehow auto-adjusting itself - like the brain auto-adjusting itself in the above article - to have its "critical" state, i.e. having the right mixture of people: not too boring but not too revolutionary. Of course, the society is much bigger and more complex than a single brain, so its adjustment is slow and inefficient. But it's interesting how it's still functioning while its education system is so broken.
- throwaway010718 7y ago
  Perhaps evolution has partially tuned the mixture of personality types that is optimal for us as a species. For example if there is a leadership gene then it should be ~10 times rarer than the follower gene. There could also be epigenomic (sp?) affects as well where one's leadership gene doesn't express itself unless there is a vacuum of leadership.
  - jackcosgrove 7y ago
    Whatever the cause of this, personality traits are not evenly distributed. I know it's not necessarily an accurate system, but the MBTI is a consistent way of classifying personalities. The distribution of types varies a lot: https://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/my-mbti-results/how-frequent-is-my-type.htm https://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/my-mbti... The biggest disparity seems to be between sensing and intuition, where sensing relies more on experience to make inferences, while intuition relies more on abstraction to make inferences. Whether this is evolutionarily optimal or just a side effect of other forces I don't know.
mythealias 7y ago
Lot of closed caption is not even close to what Chomsky is saying.
- buboard 7y ago
  switch to english (auto generated)
- jackcosgrove 7y ago
  I thought some of the incorrect captions were quite poignant! I am still wondering if someone had a hand in that.
hillsofhills 7y ago
The US formalism and legal system around public education specifically calls out its purpose for creating nationally aligned citizenship. For example a few years ago Colorado proposed to educate High Schoolers using a textbook that highlights morally questionable aspects of American history from the perspective of "The Left" (Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States"), it was rejected by the courts on the grounds it would not accomplish the required purpose of creating nationally aligned citizens, crucially NOT because it wasn't a good textbook for teaching history.
- analog31 7y ago
  The public high schools in my locale use that textbook.
- basch 7y ago
  I've often felt that despite going to a high school that championed critical thinking, that certain topics were closer to indoctrination. I've noticed, with much of the public, if democracy is criticized the response is usually akin to "it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…" more often in the form of "well what do you think is better" followed by the bad sides of that system. It doesnt actually address the argument. That single catch phrase became a way to shut down critical thinking before it began. "Nope I have the ultimate rebuttal, I wont even entertain other premises, even hypothetically." People were taught that, despite its flaws, its best, and dont question that it might not be the best. To question democracy itself, as not superior to everything else, is painful and frightening to many, as it fractures their worldview and lenses theyve built with which they understand the world. Defense of democracy feels more like fanaticism, the way people choose a sports team and then never question it. (Lions fans may question their allegiance, but thats a different story.) It becomes a bit recursive, as democracy is powered by and predicated on an educated electorate.
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    If you are going to posit such questions then you should be able to answer their question with your opinion/thoughts. It's your responsibility as the person asking the question in 99% of the situations that it would come up. If you have a good firm grounding for meritocracy, fascism, technocracy, etc then you should have a sound argument to present it. At that point you can look down upon them for defaulting to democracy.
lycidas 7y ago
I think we can't really expect the opposite to happen. There's not an educational system out there that would actively try to delegitimize itself or the power structures it exists in. That being said, Chomsky's works -- especially, Understanding Power and Manufacturing Consent -- are extremely helpful to understanding our current world. Even if the examples are out-dated, you can see the same things play out today as they did in the 80's. I would recommend them even if you don't align personally with his politics.
PavlovsCat 7y ago
Chomsky's talk titled "Corporate Attack on Education" held at St. Philip's Church, Harlem on March 16, 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbMP-cy1INA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbMP-cy1INA > I think the university should tolerate a large diversity of opinion, which it does not. I think there is a severe failure - the failure is one of honesty, in my opinion. That is, I don't believe that scholarship within the university attempts to come to grips with the real structure of the society. I think it is under such narrow ideological controls that it avoids any concern or investigation of central issues in our society. -- Noam Chomsky, interview in Business Today (May, 1973) https://chomsky.info/197305__/ https://chomsky.info/197305__/
whinythepooh 7y ago
Also school plants into children some biases that later used by authorities for divide-and-conquer. E.g. the school told me that I belong to some ethnicity and that there are other ethnicities I should know about. As a child I couldn't care less. Why would they tell me this if ethnicity doesn't even matter for future job? Another example is socio-economic system classification: capitalist vs socialist vs fascist vs monarchy etc. Why does it have to be so clean-cut categories? Like if you're not in one camp then you have to be in another. Just another divisive tool. So they do want to create the work force but they also want to prevent any sort of revolt and thus plant psychological leverages in peoples' heads. It is a science of social engineering that they don't teach in schools.
- asimilator 7y ago
  > E.g. the school told me that I belong to some ethnicity and that there are other ethnicities I should know about. As a child I couldn't care less. Why would they tell me this if ethnicity doesn't even matter for future job? I don't think you could have even a basic understanding of history without understanding what ethnicities are and some details about the historical experiences of at least a few of these groups. But let's buy in to the premise, for a second, that schools should only teach you things you need to get a job (which ignores how important a well educated population is to democracy). Historical discrimination and the current disadvantage of several ethnic groups directly informs the hiring policies of many major companies (in the US). So ethnic groups may directly impact you getting a job.
s1k3b8 7y ago
It's quite eye opening to learn about the origins of the modern education system. The how and the why of the modern school system. Especially the people who brought the public school system from europe to america. They certainly weren't interested in creating a population of critical thinkers. It's why public "education" is supported by such disparate countries like america to nazi germany to the soviet union to communist china. One thing all countries and politicians and elites love is public "education".
knzhou 7y ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the problem is always scale. The modern system of American education really was born out of idealism, in fact the same ideals that the comments here are using to attack it. It doesn't even matter what you start with. When you scale, you end up with mass education, i.e. a system tasked with the job of actively taking care of almost every American child for 40 hours a week, whether they want it or not. There is no way to have that without the inevitable accompanying problems.
- natmaka 7y ago
  Indeed, and Leopold Kohr explained it clearly. Is is also related to velocity. Modern education also enforces 'scale': "We have been educated in the worship of the bulk, of the large, of the universal, of the colossal, and have come away from the minuscule, the completeness and universality on the smallest scale the individual, which is the protoplasm of all social life."
- thundergolfer 7y ago
  > There is no way to have that without the inevitable accompanying problems. What are these problems and why are they inevitable? Mass education in the USA is public education, and if the USA had a good national curriculum and accompanying system of teaching why would it necessarily produce indoctrination? If you're conflating the necessary standardisation of mass education with indoctrination well that's just wrong. Having a shared epistemic foundation is the basis for a free democratic society not the undermining of it. The English language is itself a shared epistemic foundation and yet mass literacy campaigns are obviously not a tool of indoctrination. They are tools of freedom and empowerment.
cable2600 7y ago
People should go to school to learn, not to be indoctrinated. They should learn critical thinking to for their own ideas and opinions based on facts and logic.
- threwere434234f 7y ago
  This is a joke right ? Historiography (like most of "humanities") is almost entirely based upon ideology to write a story around certain "facts". The practitioners might call that it is a "science" to satisfy their Physics envy, but the intent in these fields is more about molding the world more than it is about modeling it. You can never be proven wrong by writing the future. Orwell was right. Chomsky has no alternative other than pushing another imperial narrative, like his liberal counterparts during the British Empire.
emrehan 7y ago
I’d highly recommend Sceptical Essays(1928) by Bertrand Russell to anybody interested in the topic: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/144355.Sceptical_Essays https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/144355.Sceptical_Essays
- harry8 7y ago
  https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.222966/page/n3 https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.222966/page/n3 Has it for download
aaron695 7y ago
Garbage. You can look at countries without high levels or any education in existence today. They are far more Indoctrinated. They are far less free thinking. Even in a strict religious school I would say every year of education makes a person less indoctrinated. The things you have to learn like science outweigh that years negatives whatever that maybe. Could you improve the education system.... yes... we all know that. But are not sure how. The idea about Japan not being scientific is however very interesting for 1989. The meme they are technologically advanced isn't really correct, it's almost a racist mythology.
mbar84 7y ago
There are endless debates about curriculum and yet there is one lessen that is never up for debate, and it is thought throughout every day and in every lessen: Sit down, be quiet, do as you're told. I wonder what a society would look like, where each of us had not been exposed to over a decade of this in our most impressionable years.
- bellweather49 7y ago
  This is so true, and makes me so sad to think about. I regard formal education as a form of emotional abuse for this very reason.
  - cvshepherd 7y ago
    my adhd was still undiagnosed back in my school days, and i guess i'm kind of traumatised by that time because i regularly have nightmares about it, and am 100% certain i'd ball my eyes out if i ever met that one teacher again. that was almost 30 years ago. edit: and all in all it was a pretty decent school
valvar 7y ago
It never ceases to amaze me how this pseudo-intellectual hack is taken seriously at all. But I suppose it must be by people who have not really been exposed to any serious thinking before. Leaving aside how unoriginal and trite the things he is saying actually are (I imagine it's what Trump would sound like if he had a wider vocabulary), just consider his smear of Bloom and his book. It's amazing. Here's a very serious book that tries to address the problems he just presented, and all he's got is something worse than a straw man. Suggesting that the classics have a place in the curriculum is 'a couple of smart guys deciding what the great thoughts are' and paramount to imposing authority and trashing everything else. He even manages to sandwich it into 'turning the schools into marine corps'. I think only two conclusions are possible - either he had not read the book in question, or he is willfully lying about it (and not very convincingly).
- trevyn 7y ago
  Perhaps a change of perspective has the potential to reduce your level of amazement?
  - valvar 7y ago
    I'm sure. What do you have in mind?
- nabla9 7y ago
  pseudointellectual n. A person who claims proficiency in scholarly or artistic activities while lacking in-depth knowledge or critical understanding. As someone who disagrees a lot with the views of Noam Chomsky, I must say that you can never call him pseudointellectual. Chomsky is an intellectual in the truest sense of the word. Academically he has contributed into linguistics and theoretical computer science. As a political thinker he forms his toughs and arguments irritatingly well.
  - valvar 7y ago
    >Academically he has contributed into linguistics and theoretical computer science This is true, but >As a political thinker he forms his toughs and arguments irritatingly well. is something people keep saying, but which I have never seen substantiated. I've read many of his pieces and wasted hours listening to his blabbing. None of it is profound, and a lot of it is quite the opposite (the video linked being one of the most egregious examples). Perhaps he can be admired for being a good con man, though - somehow his rhetoric manages to fool a lot of people.
dennis_jeeves 7y ago
What a coincidence, I posted this just yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21730116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21730116 : My post reads: In my view schools/universities are institutions for mass indoctrination. Noam Chomsky has said something along similar lines. I borrowed the words from him. A bunch of my other observations: https://realminority.wordpress.com/observations-of-the-world https://realminority.wordpress.com/observations-of-the-world
- OJFord 7y ago
  Not necessarily a coincidence, I've often gone down a rabbit hole of reading triggered by an interesting HN comment; sometimes that comes back to HN in the form of a submission of something in the rabbit hole that I found particularly interesting.
  - dennis_jeeves 7y ago
    Now that I think of it, it's probably not a co-incidence. The author 'zainamro' who posted the parent post, probably read my post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21730116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21730116) and then did a google search to come up with the video that he then posted.
    - zainamro 7y ago
      I actually hadn’t seen your comment — I read PG’s essay and was similarly reminded of Chomsky’s view on education and specifically this video. So it was a coincidence in a sense but less so because of PG’s essay.
pariahHN 7y ago
Well of course it is. How are you supposed to learn about how to integrate into society without, you know...learning about it? I wish people would be more specific - it's not that education in of itself is bad, it's that the way it is currently implemented in this specific society has these specific flaws. I strongly dislike when a discussion disparages an entire concept when it's really just our implementation of that concept that is flawed. It rules out potential solutions simply because they are associated with ones that failed, when the differences between them could result in success. Not saying that's what's in the video - I get the impression that they are in fact talking about specifically the implementation and not ripping on education itself, but I've seen and heard stuff like this used as the foundation not only of attacks on being educated but also on anything else where some implementations of an ideal failed and so the ideal and all possible solutions stemming from that ideal are dismissed as unworkable. And it bothers me a bit how that approach is popular among many sides of many arguments that I have seen. I would in fact suggest that it is in fact a marker of a failed education - using an example of a failed implementation to argue that the concept itself is inherently flawed is itself an example of a failure in critical thinking.
- 9c8675a8 7y ago
  > I strongly dislike when a discussion disparages an entire concept when it's really just our implementation of that concept that is flawed. You sound like one of those "intellectuals" that gets upset when you can't force your "great ideas" upon others.

198 points by zainamro 7y ago

Nice video! I'd like to know when and where Chomsky made these remarks. In fact, I'd like to watch the entire presentation. Strange that the captions are often incorrect -- did Chomsky review and approve them?

zainamro 7y ago
The video is an excerpt from a speech he made in 1989. Here's the full speech: https://youtu.be/G2dJ0iBhTcA?t=79 https://youtu.be/G2dJ0iBhTcA?t=79.
topspin 7y ago
> Strange that the captions are often incorrect The captions are GoogleYoutube automatic captioning of a 30 years old low-fi, badly clipped, slightly mumbled recording. Frequent errors are to be expected. You can turn them off by clicking the little "CC" button on the bottom right of the player because the captions are not actually part of the video. Safe to say Chomsky isn't reviewing or approving any of it.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mc32 7y ago

It most certainly is! If you listen to kids they will tell you their take on the environment, consumption, worthy causes, etc. I’m quite sure they’re not thinking about these things themselves. So yeah, teachers indoctrinate students with their biases. Some kids seek out their own information as they grow up, many don’t question it. So we end up in places where nuclear power was bad, for example, or banning straws (when there are much bigger issues with plastics) and detrimental things like everyone is special and unique and the future is yours to conquer (and of course this leads to disappointment when due to outsourcing and shipping jobs overseas they end up working at dead end minimum wage jobs).

WalterBright 7y ago
In my father's later years he was head of the business dept at a college. He taught classes in business and finance. He'd often have students come up to him and say they had no idea there was even a case for free markets. All they'd ever heard in school was how awful they were. They'd thank him for opening their eyes. At one time, the other staff (all socialists) invited him to participate in a debate about free markets in front of the students, and warned my father that they were going to take him apart. He happily agreed. They wound up rather sorry they'd done that. My father was an experienced debater, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of economics and history. He shredded them :-) and some had the class to come up later and thank him for opening their eyes as well, as they hadn't believed there was a case for free markets either.
- Porthos9K 7y ago
  What kind of free markets are we talking about? Free as in corporations get to run amok, or free as in no corporations because the state doesn't have the authority to grant incorporation papers?
  - jstewartmobile 7y ago
    Carroll Quigley wrote frequently on how the modern concept of a corporation is one of an "immortal"--unlimited in both lifetime and scope of operations--and that bestowing such power on a group of individuals can only end badly. Of course, tell that to people who mostly work at and/or invest in corporations, and points will be burned. Thank you for your service.
    - Porthos9K 7y ago
      No worries. Points don't matter; getting more doesn't make my johnson bigger, nor does losing them diminish me. I still have six inches either way, and that's enough.
- throwawayjava 7y ago
  And then everybody clapped.

Koshkin 7y ago

It is intended to be, but in reality it’s just a system that trains students to pass tests. For the most part, such system leaves students highly skeptical towards everything - which is a good thing.

WalterBright 7y ago
> it’s just a system that trains students to pass tests How do you verify that the students learned anything without some sort of tests?
- Porthos9K 7y ago
  Why does it matter?
  - ben509 7y ago
    As a citizen, I have a civic obligation to hold the government accountable for the use of my tax dollars.
    - Porthos9K 7y ago
      In that case, you have more pressing concerns than the public schools, such as the military-industrial-congressional complex, corporate welfare, and a tax code that privileges rent-seeking over labor.
      - ben509 7y ago
        Nonsense, besides the fact that I can look at more than one budget item at a time, education is one of the biggest[1], being between 20% and 40% of every state's budget. > ... and a tax code that privileges rent-seeking over labor. Education also has multiple lobbies that beside their own rent-seeking are indoctrinating young voters and more and more educators are engaging in partisan politics in the classroom. [1]: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/how-much-of-each-states-budget-goes-to-education https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/how-much-of-each-states-b...

remir 7y ago

I believe the most important thing we can teach kids is the ability to discern influences, at all time. Some are positive, and obviously some are negative. Everything exert an influence on us and it is crucial to be aware of it. People should be able to see the world with their own eyes, instead of with the eyes of culture or other socially transmitted concepts.

godzillabrennus 7y ago
Also important to teach children about biases. Some are healthy for quick decisions that yield positive returns. Some are established simply by cultural norms and are harmful to propagate further.

sn41 7y ago

Over time, I've come to realise that the most important gift we can give our children is formal training in critical thinking. I think STEM and such can wait. The ability to question narratives put forth by the industry, the government, media, political parties etc. is important not only to realise the truth at an abstract level, but also has practical implications on things such as successful investment strategies.

chongli 7y ago
Unfortunately, we don't really know how to do this. Longitudinal studies of critical thinking skills across 4 years of college show a modest improvement but there are caveats [1]. For one, the usual courses you'd expect to improve critical thinking (logic, philosophy, statistics) don't do very well. Going beyond what Scott discussed, I found this study [2] which seems to show that critical thinking skills are mostly correlated with verbal intelligence and trait openness. It's only one study though, so take it with a grain of salt. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/30/college-and-critical-thinking/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/30/college-and-critical-t... [2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1073191104263250 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/107319110426325...
- StanislavPetrov 7y ago
  >Unfortunately, we don't really know how to do this. Can't say I agree, Socrates figured it out thousands of years ago! >Unfortunately, we don't really know how to do this. Longitudinal studies of critical thinking skills across 4 years of college show a modest improvement but there are caveats [1]. For one, the usual courses you'd expect to improve critical thinking (logic, philosophy, statistics) don't do very well. I'd argue that these courses are, at best, tangentially related to critical thinking. We need to teach the Socratic Method of learning to children from day 1, in all areas of study. Teaching children how to think and how to be intellectually curious is ultimately far more effective than our current methods if your desired result is an informed and intellectually capable populace.
  - chongli 7y ago

ben509 7y ago

In a very similar vein is Bryan Caplan's book "the Case Against Education." In an interview[1] he lays out his argument, roughly, as: > Right. So, the first story is called human capital, and just says that people with more education earn more money because they have been trained effectively for the jobs they are going to do. So, school--you go to school, and it gives you more skills; you make more money. Nice simple story. > The main story that I am pushing in the book is called signaling. This says that, yes, going to school does cause your earnings to go up; but, the reason isn't so much that you are learning useful skills as that you are getting certified. You are getting a stamp on your forehead saying, 'Great; hey, premium worker. Hire this person.' > And then, the last story is called ability bias. This one just says that it's just coincidental that people who have more education make more money; and rather, what's going on is it's the kind of thing that wealthy people--the people who are going to be wealthy--rather do. [1]: https://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-education/ https://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-ed...

theLotusGambit 7y ago
Funnily enough, The Case Against Education made me more comfortable with my place in the education system, because it gave me a better idea of what I'm actually accomplishing as a student. Definitely cleared up a fair bit of angst and resentment for me. I wish I had read it in high school, but better late than never.
tasogare 7y ago
> The main story that I am pushing in the book is called signaling I saw this idea a lot in other various threads. As the average HN poster is probably well educated, I wonder if it’s a biais coming from software engineering where most of the skill set is learnt by experience. Anyway, I have a long list of university degree, and I can tell there are indeed differences with autodidacts that learnt the same general fields. The fundamental difference is that university forces one to learn the unfunny parts. For computer science it means for example functional programming, database normal forms, language theory, anything with mathematics inside, etc. Of course, university classes alone are not enough and much like an autodidact much study have to be done alone, which might lead one to conclude that university is not required. But I don’t think it the case.

hi41 7y ago

I don’t agree with this. Because of the education I received at K-12 and undergrad studies, I was able to get a job. Without that I would not have been able to support my family. Also the K-12 educational systems across the world have lifted several billions out of poverty. Without educational system most people would be mired in ignorance and believing in myths.

newnewpdro 7y ago
> Without educational system most people would be mired in ignorance and believing in myths. Most people are mired in ignorance and believing in myths, despite having educational systems.
adamnemecek 7y ago
They are not against education, but against the educational system. > Also the K-12 educational systems across the world have lifted several billions out of poverty. No, that was education. Also, yes, maybe at some point school was useful, however a lot has changed since then however school really hasn't kept up.
tryptophan 7y ago
> K-12 educational systems across the world have lifted several billions out of poverty. You can just as easily say "countries spend more on education as they become richer". The correlation goes both ways (and thats all it is, a correlation. Beware those who assume causation!). I think its a little absurd to think that teaching geometry and Shakespeare to kids somehow will magically lift them all out of poverty.

euske 7y ago

I just found that this OP and the other two HN articles I've stumbled on today are somehow related at a deeper level - they're all talking about the creativity and intelligence in general. The Lesson to Unlearn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21729619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21729619 Brain tunes itself to criticality, maximizing information processing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21729211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21729211 I don't think all individuals should become a 100% creative/original person. That would make the society very unstable. So we need some (actually, a lot of) obedient people that makes the society keep going, in this regard that I think the current education is useful. On the other hand, there's always a rebel no matter how hard we try to cast people into a form. The question is that the society needs a good mixture of creative and boring people and I don't know how we can achieve that. My theory right now is the society is somehow auto-adjusting itself - like the brain auto-adjusting itself in the above article - to have its "critical" state, i.e. having the right mixture of people: not too boring but not too revolutionary. Of course, the society is much bigger and more complex than a single brain, so its adjustment is slow and inefficient. But it's interesting how it's still functioning while its education system is so broken.

throwaway010718 7y ago
Perhaps evolution has partially tuned the mixture of personality types that is optimal for us as a species. For example if there is a leadership gene then it should be ~10 times rarer than the follower gene. There could also be epigenomic (sp?) affects as well where one's leadership gene doesn't express itself unless there is a vacuum of leadership.
- jackcosgrove 7y ago
  Whatever the cause of this, personality traits are not evenly distributed. I know it's not necessarily an accurate system, but the MBTI is a consistent way of classifying personalities. The distribution of types varies a lot: https://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/my-mbti-results/how-frequent-is-my-type.htm https://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/my-mbti... The biggest disparity seems to be between sensing and intuition, where sensing relies more on experience to make inferences, while intuition relies more on abstraction to make inferences. Whether this is evolutionarily optimal or just a side effect of other forces I don't know.

mythealias 7y ago

Lot of closed caption is not even close to what Chomsky is saying.

buboard 7y ago
switch to english (auto generated)
jackcosgrove 7y ago
I thought some of the incorrect captions were quite poignant! I am still wondering if someone had a hand in that.

hillsofhills 7y ago

The US formalism and legal system around public education specifically calls out its purpose for creating nationally aligned citizenship. For example a few years ago Colorado proposed to educate High Schoolers using a textbook that highlights morally questionable aspects of American history from the perspective of "The Left" (Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States"), it was rejected by the courts on the grounds it would not accomplish the required purpose of creating nationally aligned citizens, crucially NOT because it wasn't a good textbook for teaching history.

analog31 7y ago
The public high schools in my locale use that textbook.
basch 7y ago
I've often felt that despite going to a high school that championed critical thinking, that certain topics were closer to indoctrination. I've noticed, with much of the public, if democracy is criticized the response is usually akin to "it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…" more often in the form of "well what do you think is better" followed by the bad sides of that system. It doesnt actually address the argument. That single catch phrase became a way to shut down critical thinking before it began. "Nope I have the ultimate rebuttal, I wont even entertain other premises, even hypothetically." People were taught that, despite its flaws, its best, and dont question that it might not be the best. To question democracy itself, as not superior to everything else, is painful and frightening to many, as it fractures their worldview and lenses theyve built with which they understand the world. Defense of democracy feels more like fanaticism, the way people choose a sports team and then never question it. (Lions fans may question their allegiance, but thats a different story.) It becomes a bit recursive, as democracy is powered by and predicated on an educated electorate.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  If you are going to posit such questions then you should be able to answer their question with your opinion/thoughts. It's your responsibility as the person asking the question in 99% of the situations that it would come up. If you have a good firm grounding for meritocracy, fascism, technocracy, etc then you should have a sound argument to present it. At that point you can look down upon them for defaulting to democracy.

lycidas 7y ago

I think we can't really expect the opposite to happen. There's not an educational system out there that would actively try to delegitimize itself or the power structures it exists in. That being said, Chomsky's works -- especially, Understanding Power and Manufacturing Consent -- are extremely helpful to understanding our current world. Even if the examples are out-dated, you can see the same things play out today as they did in the 80's. I would recommend them even if you don't align personally with his politics.

PavlovsCat 7y ago

Chomsky's talk titled "Corporate Attack on Education" held at St. Philip's Church, Harlem on March 16, 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbMP-cy1INA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbMP-cy1INA > I think the university should tolerate a large diversity of opinion, which it does not. I think there is a severe failure - the failure is one of honesty, in my opinion. That is, I don't believe that scholarship within the university attempts to come to grips with the real structure of the society. I think it is under such narrow ideological controls that it avoids any concern or investigation of central issues in our society. -- Noam Chomsky, interview in Business Today (May, 1973) https://chomsky.info/197305__/ https://chomsky.info/197305__/

whinythepooh 7y ago

Also school plants into children some biases that later used by authorities for divide-and-conquer. E.g. the school told me that I belong to some ethnicity and that there are other ethnicities I should know about. As a child I couldn't care less. Why would they tell me this if ethnicity doesn't even matter for future job? Another example is socio-economic system classification: capitalist vs socialist vs fascist vs monarchy etc. Why does it have to be so clean-cut categories? Like if you're not in one camp then you have to be in another. Just another divisive tool. So they do want to create the work force but they also want to prevent any sort of revolt and thus plant psychological leverages in peoples' heads. It is a science of social engineering that they don't teach in schools.

asimilator 7y ago
> E.g. the school told me that I belong to some ethnicity and that there are other ethnicities I should know about. As a child I couldn't care less. Why would they tell me this if ethnicity doesn't even matter for future job? I don't think you could have even a basic understanding of history without understanding what ethnicities are and some details about the historical experiences of at least a few of these groups. But let's buy in to the premise, for a second, that schools should only teach you things you need to get a job (which ignores how important a well educated population is to democracy). Historical discrimination and the current disadvantage of several ethnic groups directly informs the hiring policies of many major companies (in the US). So ethnic groups may directly impact you getting a job.

s1k3b8 7y ago

It's quite eye opening to learn about the origins of the modern education system. The how and the why of the modern school system. Especially the people who brought the public school system from europe to america. They certainly weren't interested in creating a population of critical thinkers. It's why public "education" is supported by such disparate countries like america to nazi germany to the soviet union to communist china. One thing all countries and politicians and elites love is public "education".

knzhou 7y ago

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the problem is always scale. The modern system of American education really was born out of idealism, in fact the same ideals that the comments here are using to attack it. It doesn't even matter what you start with. When you scale, you end up with mass education, i.e. a system tasked with the job of actively taking care of almost every American child for 40 hours a week, whether they want it or not. There is no way to have that without the inevitable accompanying problems.

natmaka 7y ago
Indeed, and Leopold Kohr explained it clearly. Is is also related to velocity. Modern education also enforces 'scale': "We have been educated in the worship of the bulk, of the large, of the universal, of the colossal, and have come away from the minuscule, the completeness and universality on the smallest scale the individual, which is the protoplasm of all social life."
thundergolfer 7y ago
> There is no way to have that without the inevitable accompanying problems. What are these problems and why are they inevitable? Mass education in the USA is public education, and if the USA had a good national curriculum and accompanying system of teaching why would it necessarily produce indoctrination? If you're conflating the necessary standardisation of mass education with indoctrination well that's just wrong. Having a shared epistemic foundation is the basis for a free democratic society not the undermining of it. The English language is itself a shared epistemic foundation and yet mass literacy campaigns are obviously not a tool of indoctrination. They are tools of freedom and empowerment.

cable2600 7y ago

People should go to school to learn, not to be indoctrinated. They should learn critical thinking to for their own ideas and opinions based on facts and logic.

threwere434234f 7y ago
This is a joke right ? Historiography (like most of "humanities") is almost entirely based upon ideology to write a story around certain "facts". The practitioners might call that it is a "science" to satisfy their Physics envy, but the intent in these fields is more about molding the world more than it is about modeling it. You can never be proven wrong by writing the future. Orwell was right. Chomsky has no alternative other than pushing another imperial narrative, like his liberal counterparts during the British Empire.

emrehan 7y ago

I’d highly recommend Sceptical Essays(1928) by Bertrand Russell to anybody interested in the topic: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/144355.Sceptical_Essays https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/144355.Sceptical_Essays

harry8 7y ago
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.222966/page/n3 https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.222966/page/n3 Has it for download

aaron695 7y ago

Garbage. You can look at countries without high levels or any education in existence today. They are far more Indoctrinated. They are far less free thinking. Even in a strict religious school I would say every year of education makes a person less indoctrinated. The things you have to learn like science outweigh that years negatives whatever that maybe. Could you improve the education system.... yes... we all know that. But are not sure how. The idea about Japan not being scientific is however very interesting for 1989. The meme they are technologically advanced isn't really correct, it's almost a racist mythology.

mbar84 7y ago

There are endless debates about curriculum and yet there is one lessen that is never up for debate, and it is thought throughout every day and in every lessen: Sit down, be quiet, do as you're told. I wonder what a society would look like, where each of us had not been exposed to over a decade of this in our most impressionable years.

bellweather49 7y ago
This is so true, and makes me so sad to think about. I regard formal education as a form of emotional abuse for this very reason.
- cvshepherd 7y ago
  my adhd was still undiagnosed back in my school days, and i guess i'm kind of traumatised by that time because i regularly have nightmares about it, and am 100% certain i'd ball my eyes out if i ever met that one teacher again. that was almost 30 years ago. edit: and all in all it was a pretty decent school

valvar 7y ago

It never ceases to amaze me how this pseudo-intellectual hack is taken seriously at all. But I suppose it must be by people who have not really been exposed to any serious thinking before. Leaving aside how unoriginal and trite the things he is saying actually are (I imagine it's what Trump would sound like if he had a wider vocabulary), just consider his smear of Bloom and his book. It's amazing. Here's a very serious book that tries to address the problems he just presented, and all he's got is something worse than a straw man. Suggesting that the classics have a place in the curriculum is 'a couple of smart guys deciding what the great thoughts are' and paramount to imposing authority and trashing everything else. He even manages to sandwich it into 'turning the schools into marine corps'. I think only two conclusions are possible - either he had not read the book in question, or he is willfully lying about it (and not very convincingly).

trevyn 7y ago
Perhaps a change of perspective has the potential to reduce your level of amazement?
- valvar 7y ago
  I'm sure. What do you have in mind?
nabla9 7y ago
pseudointellectual n. A person who claims proficiency in scholarly or artistic activities while lacking in-depth knowledge or critical understanding. As someone who disagrees a lot with the views of Noam Chomsky, I must say that you can never call him pseudointellectual. Chomsky is an intellectual in the truest sense of the word. Academically he has contributed into linguistics and theoretical computer science. As a political thinker he forms his toughs and arguments irritatingly well.
- valvar 7y ago
  >Academically he has contributed into linguistics and theoretical computer science This is true, but >As a political thinker he forms his toughs and arguments irritatingly well. is something people keep saying, but which I have never seen substantiated. I've read many of his pieces and wasted hours listening to his blabbing. None of it is profound, and a lot of it is quite the opposite (the video linked being one of the most egregious examples). Perhaps he can be admired for being a good con man, though - somehow his rhetoric manages to fool a lot of people.

dennis_jeeves 7y ago

What a coincidence, I posted this just yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21730116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21730116 : My post reads: In my view schools/universities are institutions for mass indoctrination. Noam Chomsky has said something along similar lines. I borrowed the words from him. A bunch of my other observations: https://realminority.wordpress.com/observations-of-the-world https://realminority.wordpress.com/observations-of-the-world

OJFord 7y ago
Not necessarily a coincidence, I've often gone down a rabbit hole of reading triggered by an interesting HN comment; sometimes that comes back to HN in the form of a submission of something in the rabbit hole that I found particularly interesting.
- dennis_jeeves 7y ago
  Now that I think of it, it's probably not a co-incidence. The author 'zainamro' who posted the parent post, probably read my post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21730116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21730116) and then did a google search to come up with the video that he then posted.
  - zainamro 7y ago
    I actually hadn’t seen your comment — I read PG’s essay and was similarly reminded of Chomsky’s view on education and specifically this video. So it was a coincidence in a sense but less so because of PG’s essay.

pariahHN 7y ago

Well of course it is. How are you supposed to learn about how to integrate into society without, you know...learning about it? I wish people would be more specific - it's not that education in of itself is bad, it's that the way it is currently implemented in this specific society has these specific flaws. I strongly dislike when a discussion disparages an entire concept when it's really just our implementation of that concept that is flawed. It rules out potential solutions simply because they are associated with ones that failed, when the differences between them could result in success. Not saying that's what's in the video - I get the impression that they are in fact talking about specifically the implementation and not ripping on education itself, but I've seen and heard stuff like this used as the foundation not only of attacks on being educated but also on anything else where some implementations of an ideal failed and so the ideal and all possible solutions stemming from that ideal are dismissed as unworkable. And it bothers me a bit how that approach is popular among many sides of many arguments that I have seen. I would in fact suggest that it is in fact a marker of a failed education - using an example of a failed implementation to argue that the concept itself is inherently flawed is itself an example of a failure in critical thinking.

9c8675a8 7y ago
> I strongly dislike when a discussion disparages an entire concept when it's really just our implementation of that concept that is flawed. You sound like one of those "intellectuals" that gets upset when you can't force your "great ideas" upon others.