> From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu>
> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 13:56:24 -0500
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Elite Institutions/SATs
>
> [From Noam Chomsky Interviewed by Tor Wennerberg Nov. 1998:]
>
> Q: If we consider the likelihood that we as humans have an instinct for
> creativity and a moral instinct, what is it in the way our system of
> education is functioning, that perverts or inhibits these instincts from
> fully developing themselves?
>
> A: A good educational system ought to nurture and encourage these aspects
> of human life and allow them to flourish. But of course that has problems.
> For one thing it means that you will encourage challenge of authority and
> domination. It will encourage questioning of powerful institutions. The
> fact of the matter is that honesty, integrity, creativity, all these
> things we're supposed to value, all run up dramatically against the
> hierarchic, authoritarian structure of the institutional framework in
> which we live. And since that structure is what sets the basic framework
> in which things happen, it becomes virtually contradictory to implement
> the values that you talk about in church on Sunday morning. So you put the
> values to the side, to the Sunday Service, and get on with existing the
> rest of the time. So Sunday is when you say, yeah, love and kindness and
> charity and equality and all that stuff are the soul of life. But the
> other six days of the week you're working within institutions of authority
> and domination and control and self-enrichment and so on and you must
> comply or suffer even graver consequences for not complying.
>
> And schools are like that. So the way schools actually function - of
> course it's not 100 percent, because there is a contradiction, so all
> sorts of aspects show themselves depending on the teacher and so on - but,
> by and large, there's a very strong tendency which works its way out in
> the long run and on average, for the schools to have a kind of filtering
> effect. They filter out independence of thought, creativity, imagination,
> and in their place foster obedience and subordination. I think everyone
> knows this from their own history. Like, how did I get to a good college
> myself? I was always very critical and dissident. But I got there by
> shutting up! I went through high school, thinking it was all really stupid
> and authoritarian and boring, but I was obedient, I was quiet, I wasn't a
> behavior problem, I didn't tell the teacher what I thought he was teaching
> was ludicrous when I thought it was. And I made it to a good college.
>
> There are people who don't accept, who aren't obedient. They are weeded
> out, they're driving taxi cabs, they're behavior problems. The long-term
> effect of this is to reward and foster subordination; it begins in
> kindergarten and goes all the way through your professional or other
> career. If you challenge authority, you get in one or another kind of
> trouble. Again, it's not 100 percent the case, and there are some areas of
> life were it's dramatically not the case, but on average and
> overwhelmingly in the outcomes, it holds...
>
>
> On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, Liza Featherstone wrote:
>
>> ...But many -- I'd venture to say most -- of the "smartest" people I
>> met at Michigan [by smart here I mean creative, capable of saying
>> something surprising or otherwise interesting, engaged with ideas
>> outside the classroom, in short people you want to stay up late
>> getting high with] weren't in this program. In fact, the program, vs.
>> the many different kind of intelligence in the larger student
>> population, was kind of a test tube display of how SAT/ACT scores do
>> measure some things, but not others.
>>
>
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