This speaks to a rather odd state of mind on the part of the teacher. “The great man”? Believing that the state of education and testing is the result of some

This speaks to a rather odd state of mind on the part of the teacher. “The great man”? Believing that the state of education and testing is the result of some powerful villain behind the curtain requires more credulity than simply attributing it to the massive complexity and inertia you describe. Certainly Chomsky is a great man. He's the founder of modern linguistics. He wrote the paper that demolished behavioral psychology, paving the way for cognitive psychology. He invented the hierarchy of formal languages that is still taught in every Computer Science program in the world. He is the most cited academic in the world. He is the most influential thinker in two completely unrelated fields: linguistics and political activism. He's an "Institute Professor" at MIT, which is the highest honor that MIT bestows. (I think that there are fewer of them at MIT than there are Nobel Laureates.) Just what is there not to consider great? As to "some powerful villain", where did either Chomsky or the OP ever assert that the "villain" isn't a system? Perhaps a system comprised largely of complexity and inertia? I know for a fact that Chomsky believes something along these lines. He's stated many times that the harmful influences that he describes are not the result of a cabal, as he is often misattributed as asserting, but that he is and always has been speaking about the effects of a complex system, whose intent is not the intent of any individual part of the system.