Noam Chomsky - Education for Whom, and for What?

[ Music ] >> Well, I'm going to concentrate mostly on higher education, but that can't really be disconnected from what happens from infancy. So I'll say some words about early education too. In the background, there are contrasting conceptions of who, who education is for and what it is for. So let's take a look at whom it is for. One of their two fundamental views go far back. One of them, one view is that education is higher education is for, basically for the elites, for the privileged. The rest of the population should be dumbed down, maybe allowed entry into vocational schools, learned trades. But there's a more general conception that lies in the background, which strikingly holds across the mainstream political spectrum. It's more instructive, almost always, to focus on the left liberal extreme. So I'll keep to that, the less harsh extreme. So for example, the leading public intellectual of the 20th century, Walter Lippman, who was kind of a Wilson Roosevelt Kennedy liberal, his view was that the general, that we have to distinguish between the intelligent minority called the responsible men, and what he called the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders. That's the general population who have to be spectators, but not participants in action, and the responsible men, and certainly anyone who ever discusses this is always part of the intelligent minority by definition. So the intelligent minority, the responsible men who are in charge of decision making, they have to be protected in his words from the aurora and the trampling of the bewildered herd. He developed the concept of manufacture of consent, as it is a new art of democracy, which has to be used to keep the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders from interfering. He was actually relying on his own experience. These were writings in the 1920s, and so they were called progressive essays on democracy. He was relying on his experience in the first, and in many ways only official US propaganda agency, the Committee on Public Information, term that were well, would have liked. It was the Creole Commission established during the First World War to try to drive a pacifist population into raven war mongers. And it worked pretty successfully. It was led by the responsible men, the intelligent minority, who were more or less unaware that they themselves were the targets of an earlier propaganda agency, the British Ministry of Information, another or well-earned phrase, which was essentially designed to control the thought of American elites. So they would therefore participate in the great task of bringing America into the First World War on England side. Another member of the Creole Commission, who was also very impressed by it, was Edward Bernays. He is one of the main founders of the modern public relations industry, and his views were about the same. There has to be an intelligent minority in control, and we have to have a technique called an engineering of consent to make sure that the rabble stays in their place as spectators, not participants. That's the basic view goes back much farther. So for example, long before this Ralph Waldo Emerson was considering the question of why political leaders are interested in having public education. Mass public education was just beginning. And he said that the ground on which eminent public servants urged the claims of popular education is fear. In their words, he says, "This country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our throats," meaning educate them the right way, keep their perspectives and their understanding, narrow and restricted, discouraged, free and independent thought, and frighten them into obedience, something that's done over and over in the schools as well. We've all experienced it. If you're back still farther to the framing of the Constitution, it was based essentially on the same principles. So, James Madison, the major framer, his view was that pretty much the same. He said, "We have to make sure that the public is marginalized, because otherwise there'll be trouble." In fact, he read the speeches in the Constitutional Convention. He urged the Convention to think about what would happen in England. That was obviously the model. What would happen in England if they really had a democratic vote? He said, "Well, what would happen would be that the majority of the population would use their voting power to take away the property of the rich, to carry out what these days we would call land reform. And obviously that would be unjust. So therefore, we've got to guard against democracy." Actually, it's kind of interesting that whether consciously or not, Madison was reformulating an argument that goes back to the first main major study of political theory, Aristotle's book, "Politics Aristotle," reviewed the many forms of government there could be, and didn't like any of them, but decided that democracy would be the least bad. He's, of course, mostly thinking of Athens. But he raised the same dilemma. He said this, "The same problem that Madison did." One of the big problems of democracy is that the majority of the poor would use their voting power to take away and divide up the property of the rich, which is unjust. So Madison and Aristotle faced the same problem, but they picked opposite, they drew opposite conclusions. Aristotle's conclusion was, "We should eliminate inequality, make everyone middle class more or less." And he proposed actual measures for this, and what we would call today welfare state measures. And that would overcome the problem. So reduce inequality, overcome the problem. Madison's solution was the opposite. Reduced democracy. So design a system in which the public will not be able to exercise the kind of free vote that would threaten one of the main goals of government, which he said is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. So therefore, so same problem, but opposite conclusions, reduced democracy. If you look at the framing of the constitution, that's the way it's designed. So again, in Madison's words, the constitutional framework has to ensure that power is in the hands of what he called the wealth of the nation, the responsible men, the men who have respect for property and its rights, and therefore will ensure that the opulent minority is protected from the majority. And that's why in the original framing of the constitution, power is primarily in the hands of the Senate, the executive and that time was kind of administrator. So power is in the hands of the Senate, which remember people didn't vote for. That was much later. And the Senate, he said, would be the wealth of the nation, the people who would make two dishes and responsible decisions. Actually, in Madison's defense, it should be mentioned that he was at this point pre-capitalist. So his model of the wealth of the nation was some mythology about Rome, where distinguished gentlemen and benign aristocrats devoted to the public good would make all the right decisions. He soon learned differently. But that was the model, that's the way. That's the original intent of our Constitution for those who are interested in original intent, originalism. Go back a little bit further and go back to say David Hume, the first great modern political philosopher. He wrote a book called First Principles of Government. And in this, he all quoted him. He wondered at the easiness with which the many are governed by the few and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we inquire by what means this wonder is brought about, we shall find that as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them about opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only, that government is founded. And this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular. And in fact, in the more free and the more popular, where force is less available, you get the most sophisticated development of the notions of a manufacturer of consent, engineering of consent, to public relations industry, and so on. And the educational system has to be enlisted in this enterprise. It's a very conscious policy, I'll return to the way it works in the modern period. Well, that's one point of view about whom education is for. Another alternative point of view, including high culture, is that it's for everyone. And there's interesting work on this. One book I strongly recommend is, if you have good eyesight, very tiny print, unfortunately, is a book by a scholarly book by Jonathan Rose. It's called The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. It's a monumental study of the reading habits of 19th century British workers. And it's pretty remarkable to see what they were reading. Rose contrasts, I'll quote him, contrasts the passionate pursuit of knowledge by proletarian auto-didects with the pervasive Philistinism of the British hour of stocharchy. And he has good evidence for it. And pretty much the same was true in the United States. So in Boston, let's say in the 19th century, if a blacksmith had enough, it could afford it. He would typically hire a young boy to read to it while he's working and reading classics, or contemporary literature that we now consider classics in the factories that were the mills that were just beginning to be built in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. A lot of the workers were young women from the farms called factory girls. There was pretty lively labor press at the time. And very interesting to read. The factory girls had plenty of condemnations of the industrial system into which they were being forced to come back to a little bit. But one of them was that it was taking away their high culture. They were used to reading contemporary literature, classics, and so on. When they were driven into the mills, that was taken away from them. And this continued. I mean, I'm old enough to remember the 1930s at that time. There was lively programs of workers' education. And some of the leading scientists and mathematicians wrote popular books intended for worker education, mathematics for the millions, things like that, the George Gamma later, one to three, Infinity, JD Bernal, another well known scientist. And there were educational courses. I mean, my own family, my relatives, were mostly unemployed, working class, but they engaged. They were deeply immersed in high culture, even those who never made it through elementary school. They were what Rose calls a proletarian auto-died act, although they were helped by workers' education courses. And things like a free Shakespearean plays in Central Park, and so on. Well, those are two views of whom education is for to contrast in ones. Then comes the question, what it is for. And here, too, there are contrasting views. The contrast is actually discussed during the enlightenment. And there's an imagery associated with it. One image is that education is like pouring water into an empty vessel. And in fact, it's a pretty leaky vessel, as you all know, from your experience. So you pour water into a vessel. And of course, all of us have been through this, and you remember nothing. The other alternative is that education teaching should be like laying out a string along which the student can explore and progress in his own way. That image comes from Vilhaum von Humboldt, who was the founder of the modern university system, also one of the founders of classical liberalism. Get to John Dewey, America's greatest social philosopher, Century Later. He wrote that it is illiberal and immoral to train children to work, not freely and intelligently, but for the sake of the work earned, in which case, their activity is not free because not freely participated in, and as he also pointed out, it will be a leaky vessel. Those contrasting choices are very shortly drawn today. Sure, again, the most of you've seen in your own experience, I certainly have myself. It has very definite policy implications right now, in fact. I've just some very recent and a pointed discussion of this, which I'll quote the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the In-Scientific Organization, has a regular journal, journal science. And in the last couple of issues, the editor, biochemist Bruce Albert, sets forth alternatives. These alternatives very clearly. He's discussing science education in the schools, but it generalizes. So one approach he discusses is, in fact, the enlightenment view that teaching is laying out a string on which the student progresses in their own way through discovery and exploration. And his version of it is that our goal is to make it much easier for teachers everywhere to provide their students with laboratory experiences that mirror the open-ended explorations of scientists instead of the traditional cookbook labs where students follow instructions to a predetermined result. And then he contrasts that with actual practice, which is, of course, pretty much the opposite. Concepts taught with an overly strict attention to rules, procedures, and group memorizations. Then he goes on to quote his own testimony to the California Standards Commission, his testimony opposing such ideas as teaching the periodic table of the elements in fifth grade, which, for the meaning of the students, incidentally, points out he was unsuccessful in this. It's taught that way. And what he says is, when we teach children about aspects of science that they cannot yet grasp, then we have wasted valuable educational resources, produced nothing of lasting value, and much worse, we take all the enjoyment out of science when we do so. And he discusses DNA is on field. He says, unfortunately, most students today are taught about DNA at such an early age that they are forced to merely memorize the fact that-- it's a quote from a textbook-- DNA is the material from which genes are made, the chore that brings no enjoyment or understanding whatsoever. And much later, he says, when they do have the background to understand both the structure of the DNA molecule, and its explanatory power, I fear that the joy of discovery has been eliminated by the early memorization of boring DNA facts. We spoil the beautiful story for them by teaching it at the wrong time. And it goes on to the college level. He says, for example, in an introductory biology class, students are often required to learn the names of the 10 enzymes that oxidize sugars. But an obsession with such details can obscure any real understanding of the central issue. Leave students with the impression that science is impossibly dull, of course, as many of them to drop it. Tragically, we have managed to simultaneously trivialize and complicate science education. As a result, for too many-- for far too many-- science seems a game of recalling boredom. incomprehensible facts, not so much so that it may make little difference whether the factoids about science that come from a periodic table or a movie script and give some examples. Again, I'm sure you've had your own experience about that just to interpret it. I certainly have. I remember when I was a 16-year-old freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. I had to take a general chemistry course about this many students in the audience. It was insufferably boring and furthermore is completely obvious what was going to happen. So if you read the textbook, you knew exactly what was going to happen. So I never went to class. But they, you know, I got an A. It was okay. I had a friend who took notes that helped. But the worst part was that they had a lab and I knew perfectly well that if I went to the lab and carried out the experiments none of them would work. That's kind of reflects automatic. So I didn't go to the lab. There was a manual we had to fill in the answers to the results of the experiments and again, entirely obvious what they were going to be. So I filled it in, you know, it's gotten A and so on. But then I had a very unpleasant experience. I had the register for the next semester. And when I tried to register they insisted on my paying a fee for a breakage in the laboratory. I had never been to the laboratory. I didn't know where it was. But obviously couldn't say that. So I had to pay $17, which was a lot of money in those days for the breakage in the lab that I never attended. And of course, I don't remember a thing from the course. I'm sure many of you can duplicate this experience. Actually, this approach generalizes. It even has a name. It's called "No Child Left Behind." [Applause] I see you've experienced it. Actually, it's been going on for about 10 years. No reported progress, which is no surprise. A serious education is radically different. It's what Albert was recommending. And it's the way science has actually taught at the advanced levels. So take my own university at MIT. It's a research university. There's a famous world famous physicist, a late Victor Viscop, who, like a lot of senior faculty, taught freshman courses. And he used to say that when he came to the first session of his freshman course, and students would ask what I'm going to cover this semester, and his routine answer was, "It doesn't matter what we cover. It matters what you discover." And maybe you'll discover that what I'm teaching is wrong. That would be great. That's the kind of thing we want to do. This goes on right through the graduate level that's in a serious university, that's all there is. That's the whole curriculum. And that's actually possible all the way down to kindergarten. There are examples. So, in fact, Albert's in this series of articles. It gives him a good example. He talks about a kindergarten class, which won some award in the sciences. There's five-year-old kids. The task that was given them, each kid in the class was given a dish that contained seeds, petals, and shells. And their task was to figure out which ones were the seeds. So, kids got together, and what they call the scientific conference. And each had ideas about how you might do it. They exchanged the ideas, suggesting some ways of testing it, and finally carried out the tests. They finally got somewhere, a little teacher guidance, but basically figuring it out for themselves. It ended up at a point where they were. they figured out what were the seeds, and they were dissecting the seeds. They were given magnifying glasses, and could look into it and locate the embryo, which is the source of the assessments. That's learning, real learning. That's enlightenment-style learning. Not no child left behind. It can be done. And sometimes it is, like in this case, far too little. Well, let's take a brief look at the history. Not surprisingly, the US system of higher education has evolved, along with broader socioeconomic changes. Actually, it was a very sharp change at the time of World War II. Everything changed after World War II was a very dramatic event for the world history. The United States had been. was the richest country in the world, but it wasn't a major actor in the world seen that the major actors were written primarily France, Germany, but not the United States, except regionally. But after World War II was all different, totally. The United States emerged from World War II with a position of global dominance that had absolutely no precedent in history and no precedent since began declining shortly after. The United States at that time had literally 50% of the world's wealth. Other industrial societies had been seriously harmed or devastated for the United States, which is untouched by the war. The war was a tremendous stimulus, huge government stimulus to the economy, the industrial production quite brutal, and it already had been the richest country in the world. Also had a overwhelming position of security and nothing remotely like it. Well, this affected the whole culture, including education. Prior to this higher education, we stayed lead education had been a kind of a gentleman's club, and indeed it remained so, at the elite schools well after. The personal experience, again, I was a student at Harvard in the early 50s, and that's exactly what it was, was a gentleman's club. But the US had also kind-eared mass education through college as well. In fact, that's a very important achievement of American society. It was motivated in part by just what Emerson talked about. It was motivated by the transition from an agricultural society of free and dependent people to an industrial society was necessary to turn free farmers into disciplined factory workers, and since they didn't like it, you needed the kind of education that Emerson was talking about, kind of education that will keep them from our throats. And it was dramatic, I mentioned the labor press. It was very interesting to read factory girls, artisans from the towns. They have many complaints about the system they're being driven into. It's worth reading, it's available now. The industrial system, they said, was crushing their culture, their dignity, their freedom, was turning it into something like slaves. In fact, a century and a half ago, a very common belief, a so common that it was a slogan of the Republican party, that's word by Abraham Lincoln, was that wage labor is different from child slavery, only in that it's temporary. But other than that, it's the same. You're being forced, you're working on command, not under your own initiative. So they want to get rid of it, work your ownership, but so on. The most interesting, I think, the most interesting part element of their critique was their condemnation of what they called the new spirit of the age. Remember, this is 150 years ago. The new spirit of the age is gain wealth, forgetting all but self. Adam Smith, that talked about that. He called it the vial maxim of the masters of mankind, all for ourselves, nothing for anyone else. And the new spirit of the age, a century later, was to try to drive this deeply and human idea into people's heads. It was a very sharp break from traditional societies that valued the trust, the solidarity, mutual aid for common purposes. In our own tradition, the standard example is the, should be the English comments, we're going to celebrate, it probably won't. But we should be commemorating the 900th anniversary of the magnet card of the great charter in a couple of months. It's forgotten. The magnet card, as everyone ought to know, is the foundation of civil liberties, presumption of innocence, trial by jury, due process, and so on. But it's sort of forgotten, interestingly, that there were two charters. There was a charter of liberties, and there was a charter of the forests. The charter of the forests was about preservation of the commons. The comments were. including the forests were the possession of airing. And they were the source of food, of fuel, of building materials. They had been carefully cultivated with mutual aid and mutual support for centuries. So they were very complex ecosystems, which everyone had access to. And the charter, the great charter, calls for preservation of the commons from the predatory acts of the kings and nobles. Well, that's been forgotten. So nobody talks about that anymore. And that's a very serious problem, because the-- in fact, that's the failure to attend to the commons is going to destroy us. That's the environmental crisis, which we're marching towards with utter abandon. If some extraterrestrial observer was watching, I think we're all lunatics. But it's going on right now. [APPLAUSE] Unless this conception of preservation of the commons and the values that were part of it, unless that's restored, we're in trouble. Well, I'm sure they have to that with the beginnings of capitalist industrialization. There's a move towards making everything a commodity. And it then becomes necessary to inculcate the new spirit of the new spirit of the age, gain wealth for getting old itself. And reverence for what Adam Smith could have done does the vile maxim. Actually, there are major industries devoted to it. The public relations industry advertising, marketing, it's probably the sixth of gross national domestic product, is devoted pretty much to this. It's devoted very consciously, interesting to read the literature, their own literature. It's devoted to create what's called creating once a fancy needs, stimulating consumerism, turning people's attention to what are called the superficial things of life, like fashionable consumption, and away from real human values. An enormous work goes into this. People from our throats again. That new spirit of the age is so inhuman, so that over 150 years of effort, this still is always resistance. So in the early 1970s as kind of an outgrowth of 1960s activism, there was a very important series of labor strikes, the most young workers, mostly many non-vitorants, others, just young people, getting into the workforce. The most famous one was at Lordstown. And striking, very significantly, we're not striking particularly for wages and benefits, but for dignity, for human dignity in the workplace. That was also the time when women were becoming organized, an active in Chikano's, farm workers, black unions, and so on. All of this was beaten back, and it's been beaten back for a generation, but it's there. In fact, the occupied movements that are spreading all over are reviving it. There are a lot to-- [APPLAUSE] I think it's the main significance. And a lot hinges on whether the new spirit of the age in 150 years old, whether it can be, in fact, in England going back centuries to the destruction of the common, it's very important to determine whether this new spirit can be overcome. If not, we're just lemmings walking off the cliff. And soon there's a lot to say about that, but I'll put it aside. Well, again, after World War II going back to that, there was another new spirit, a spirit of triumphalism. Before the Second World War, the United States was a kind of a cultural, intellectual backwater. If you wanted to study the science or philosophy or the arts, it would be a writer. And you went to Europe, Germany, Britain, France, and a place like that. But after World War II, that all changed. And it led to just a different attitude. I remember very well. I was just coming to college student at the time. The atmosphere was that we should shed all of this old world baggage and lead the world to a bright future of what was called an American century. European scholars, many of whom were emigrating here in Flee, not to Germany. They were feared because they were too good. And they were disdain because that's the old-fashioned baggage. And the two were at the same time. There were many very ugly incidents. I could tell you about some of them, which I remember. From a student perspective, what I was in the 1940s in philosophy, linguistics, psychology, they just had to start afresh, disregard all of this old nonsense from Europe, biologic too. In fact, forget it all. Don't talk about it. And to start from the beginning, we're going to create a new age. And a lot of contempt and a lot of ignorance. And there are many consequences. Some of them right to the present. It's very striking in the behavioral sciences, in fact. But also elsewhere. But there were also changes at that time. Crucial changes in the nature of the way the economy functioned in the state role in the economy, which had a huge impact on the university's higher education, particularly. You go back to the colonial period. Adam Smith gave advice to the colonies, the greatest economist of the day. And the advice he gave was the standard prescriptions that the World Bank and the IMF and the US Treasury and others give to the poor countries today. Pursue your compare. The advantage, don't try to import higher manufacturing goods, more advanced goods from the advanced countries. And so don't try to control your resources. Everything will be better if you do that. Well, the United States was independent by that time. So they were able to totally reject the rules of what are called sound economics. And they did. If we had accepted them, we'd be a third world country. But in fact, that's how the third world was pretty much created. But the colonies could reject it. The so called Hamiltonian system introduced very high tariffs to block superior British manufacturers. There was a lot of stealing of technology, which now called piracy. And the United States began to develop. And this went from textiles, the early stages industrialization, right through steel, on pretty much to the second world, first and second world war. After a huge role of the state system in the state sector in developing the economy, mass industrialization was developed, for example, in the armories. Because there you could control things. The railroad system was managed by the Army Corps of Engineers and so on. Well, after World War II, that took a major leap forward, huge. There was massive funding for science and technology mostly through the Pentagon. And it was done through the Pentagon for the usual reasons. You have to inspire fear. And you can get taxpayers to pay the Pentagon to protect us from various imaginary dangers. But the money that went through the Pentagon ended up creating the high tech economy that we're now living in. So computers, internet, satellites, the microelectronics, whole array of stuff, comes out of decades of mostly Pentagon funding and research. My own university MIT was right in the middle of it. And the net effect is to socialize cost and to privatize profit. And it's a standard device. Interstate highway systems, another example. It's not what it's claimed to be. It was sold on the base of defense, is really part of the mass subsidy to automobiles, energy corporations, rubber corporations, turned us into the idea was to make us a society that massively used waste fossil fuels with consequences we're now in the middle of. So there was also a rapid expansion of the student body through the GI Bill, which brought a whole new sector of the population into higher education. People have never gone before. That had a very positive impact on the colleges and on the general society. That's incidentally a course that's been [BLANK_AUDIO] diverse to the last generational. Come back to it. The sharp increase in funding was mainly directed to science and technology, but of course there was a spill over into other domains. 1957, the Russians sent a satellite into space, Sputnik, and the laments about how the US is falling behind. You know, want to be destroyed and so on. The scientific community knew that this was total nonsense. That there was just the achievement was essentially nothing. You'd duplicate it and go way beyond it, anytime we wanted to. But it was exploited. It was exploited pretty cynically, I should say. I remember it very well. And it was exploited to give an enormous additional input into higher education and also K-12. That's when you get the start of the kinds of things that Alberts is deploring. Like new math, for example. I have to say I had young kids at that time. We had very amusing experiences with watching my young children, 10-year-old children, try to learn new math from teachers. You didn't understand a word about the set theoretic basis for it. But we're trying to teach it. And the kids were kind of making up their own. They'll just give you one example. When my younger daughter was maybe 10 or so, we had a visit from a friend in Israeli that jishn was an old friend. You know she was a bar-halleel. He came and stayed with us for a while. And he saw my daughter doing her work in what was called "Bullion Out Set." They've called set theory, actually, "Bullion Outer." And he was interested because he'd been trying to teach it to junior high school students in Israel. And they're probably a hard time doing it. And she seemed to be doing it fine. So we started asking her questions. Like if you have three things, how many sets are either, you know, like a milk bottle and a cup and a book or something. And she said right off, eight sets. And then he asked, well, then he asked her to list them. She listed them all, including the null set. And he asked which set is included in all the others. She said the null set. And then I couldn't believe it. So I asked her, how do you know the null set is included in all the others? So she said, well, to have a set when you do his draw braces and you put the things inside it. And if you look carefully, there's always a little space between them. That's where the null set chose. So in fact, that happened is she was doing something quite sensible. She was making up a physical model, which happened to work for these principles. And of course, I have nothing to do with what they were trying to teach me. This was going on all the time. It's-- that's no child left behind. Well, in the '60s, there were major changes, major social, cultural changes. Civil rights movement moved towards diversity, women's rights, all sorts of things. And the universities were greatly enriched by that, as indeed was the whole society. By the end of the '60s, there was also a fair amount of political activism developing. It became a major force. So again, at my own university, MIT, mainly science university, it had been extremely conservative and passive right through the '60s. People have absorbed in their work. But by the end of the '60s, by 1969, activism had gotten to the point that a day was set aside formally to just consider the question of-- for the whole-- to consider the question of the role of technology in society. Amazingly, a question that had never been asked. You just do it. And that led to a lot of consequences, which in fact have changed the-- made-- wrote about a permanent change in the institute. And similar things were happening in other places. This was even brought to, but it's a very-- it's a general movement. Well, it had a real civilizing effect on the whole society. Well, that civilizing effect of the 1960s aroused deep concerns all across the mainstream spectrum. Now, that's why it's usually called the time of troubles. It was civilizing the country too much, and that's dangerous. And it's kind of interesting to talk a little about the reaction. It has effects, very strong effects right to the present. On the right, one striking example was the influential memorandum, which it's worth reading. You can pick it up on the internet. A memorandum by Lewis Powell, who's a corporate lawyer. He was later appointed by Nixon to the Supreme Court. At the other end of the spectrum, there's an important study, also worth reading. By the trilateral commission, these are liberal internationalists from the three major industrial regions, Europe, United States, and Japan. Their general outlook is indicated by the fact that the Carter administration was drawn almost completely from their ranks. That's who they were. On both of them, merit attention, they provide a good insight into the ideological aspects of what has, in fact, been a major assault on democracy and on rights that was beginning to take shape 40 years ago, escalated pretty sharply in the Reagan-faturing years and continued, and it's now reaching new heights. And they also provide insight into how this assault targets the educational system. So let's start with Powell's memorandum, 1971. This was sent to the US Chamber of Commerce. That's the main business lobby. The title was the attack on the American free enterprise system. That's worth reading, not only for the content, but also for the tone, which is totally paranoid, which is characteristic. The major criminals were Ralph Nader, with his consumer safety campaigns, Herbert Marcusa, who was preaching Marxism, new leftists on the rampage. But primarily, their naive victims who dominate the universities, the schools, television, and other media, the educated community, and virtually control of the government. If you haven't noticed it, I'm incidentally not exaggerating. That's exactly what it said. I urge you to read it. Well, the takeover of the country by these devils is a dire threat to freedom, he said, because the only alternatives to free enterprise are varying degrees of bureaucratic regulation of individual freedom, arranging from moderate socialism to the leftist and rightist dictatorships. Actually, if any of you are watching the Republican debates, it's being the same thing as being repeated right now. The center of the right Obama administration are Marxist radicals and so on. Actually, Powell was very familiar with another alternative to free enterprise, namely the system in which he and his Chamber of Commerce associates thrived. He was an influential lobbyist for the tobacco industry, and he was surely aware of the huge federal subsidies for the production of this leading killer, which not only kills users at a scale that vastly exceeds the targets of the mostly farcical drug wars, but also kills many others. I'm death from passive smoking, collateral damage, just being around when somebody's smoking way beyond those from hard drugs. And he was surely aware of the great successes of lobbyists like him in assuring that for many decades, the government would help the-- not only subsidize the industry, but help it conceal what they all knew. They knew about the lethal product that they were peddling. And there are huge mounds of corpses to show for their achievement. They're still piling up rapidly. But that didn't keep him from whaling in his memo. That'll quote, "As every business executive knows, few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American and businessman, corporation, even the millions of corporate stockholders." In case you hadn't noticed. And that, again, is pre-characteristic. And the reason is that there's an assumption that for the state to support subsidized private power, that that's just the natural order. And the assumption of it is a catastrophe. And he then drew the obvious conclusion. He was talking about the universities. He said, "The campuses from which much of this emanates are supported by tax funds generated largely from American business and contributions from capital funds controlled or generated by American business. The boards of trustees of our universities overwhelmingly are composed of men and women who are leaders in the business system. Most of the media, including the national TV systems, are owned and theoretically. controlled by corporations which depend on profits and the enterprise system to survive. And therefore, these marginalized groups who are being destroyed should organize to defend themselves instead of just watching passively while business and our fundamental freedoms are destroyed by this Marxist onslaught from the media and the universities. Well, Powell's memo expresses the concerns elicited by 1960s activism at the right end of the mainstream spectrum. But much more revealing, I think, is the reaction at the opposite extreme, the liberal internationalists. And these are spelled out in the Trial Addero Commission report that I mentioned, this quote, "the crisis of democracy is not easy to find and suddenly because they mostly took it off the market when people started reading." But it's there. Actually, I should say that MIT, as soon as I read it, I read it when it came out and I figured this isn't going to last very long. So I bought a lot of copies from the MIT library. So if you can't find one, the MIT library has maybe a dozen or so copies. And then it did go out of print. I shouldn't say very quickly. The crisis of democracy that they were talking about is literally that there's too much democracy. The problem they said is this is leading figures, you know, major political scientists from Harvard and so on. The public, the way that democratic orders supposed to work, the public is supposed to be passive and apathetic. The Lippin, Bernatis, Emerson, Madison, model, or Hume. They're supposed to be passive, apathetic. But in the '60s, they were beginning to organize to press their demands. That's what was being done by what are called the special interests. Special interests are women, young people, old people, workers, farmers, the population of other works. And they're the special interests. If you look through the, and when they press their demands, there's too much pressure on the state. The state can't deal with them. So therefore they have to moderate the demands. Now there's one group that isn't mentioned, the corporate sector. And that makes sense because they represent a national interest, not special interests. So just like the far right, the liberal internationalists assume that their extraordinary power and their control of the state and other institutions is just the natural order. A primary concern of the trilateral scholars, just like Louis Powell, was the failures of what they called, unquote, the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young. The schools, the universities, the churches and the like, they're not carrying out their duty to indoctrinate the young properly. And that's why we had this time of troubles. In general, they said we have to have more moderation in democracy if the national interest is to be protected, including much more successful indoctrination of the young. So the Powell memo and the trilateral study spill out the concerns of the opposite extremes of the dominant ideological spectrum. These are largely shared concerns. And they've led to vigorous action to restore order, as has often happened in the past. One consequence of these and other developments has been a pretty sharp attack on public education, making many forms, or mention a few. About a year ago, I went to Mexico to give talks at the National University, Unum. Quite a good university. It's a poor, very poor country, of course, but pretty, quite a good, impressive university. High standards, good faculty, lively discussion, reasonable facilities, not like a rich American university, quite reasonable. I also visited a city university. There's a city university in Mexico City, which is, incidentally, Unum is free, not tuition. About ten years ago, there was an attempt by the government to raise just a very low tuition. That led to a national student strike. There was a very practical close down of the government. We threw the proposal that actually still on the Unum campus is an administration building that was occupied at the time, and is still occupied, and it's used as an activism center. The city university is not only free, but has open admissions with compensatory options for those who need them. It's also pretty respectable, quite impressed to see it. Well, I went from Mexico to California, maybe the richest place in the world. There, the public education system, which is just the best public education system in the world, is being destroyed. It's being privatized for the rich, of course, for the rest, some level of mostly technical training. That's quite a contrast between a poor country, in many ways, the richest place in the world. That's happening all across the country. In most states, like here I just heard before, tuition, in most states, tuition covers more than half of college budgets. That's also true of most public research universities. Pretty soon, only the community colleges will be state financed, and even they are under attack. I'm quoting a recent study, analysts generally agree that the era of affordable four-year public universities subsidized by the state may be over. That's one important way to implement indoctrination of the young. For a very good, simple reason, students leave in a debt trap. You have a college debt has reached the astonishing level of over a trillion dollars now. When a student leaves college with a big debt, they don't have many options. Indoctrination is working. That's true of social control, generally. It's also an important feature of international policy. Well as the Mexico, California, comparison illustrates, the reasons for the conscious destruction of the greatest public education system in the world in California and comparable things elsewhere, the reasons are not economic. There are many other cases including rich societies, so Germany dimension one. Or for that matter, the post-war US experience. Much poorer country than we are now, but wasn't totally free, but tuition was very low. For example, when I went to University of Pennsylvania as an undergraduate, it was literally a hundred dollars a year. That might be four hundred dollars today. It's not an economic reason, but as a technique of indoctrination, it's very valuable. Well, if they're not publicly supported, how are universities going to survive? They don't produce commodities for profit, and that's the dominant value under the new spirit of the age. The funding issue raises many troubling issues. These would not arise if fostering independent thought and inquiry were regarded as a public good, as during the Enlightenment model. That is, having intrinsic value, the traditional ideal of the universities, however flawed in practice, there are major attempts to change that, so crossing the ocean, in Britain, the right-wing government is now challenging what was called, what's been for a century, called the whole day in principle. It's a century old principle, the barred government intrusion into academic research, but they'll succeed in overturning it, I don't know. And well, there's another kind of assault on intellectual culture that you can read about in this morning's newspapers. The Cameron government has announced that it's not going to apologize. It's not going to give an apology for essentially murdering one of the great mathematicians and scientists of the 20th century, Alan Turing, who apart from being a major intellectual figure also happened to be a warrior. He was crucially involved in decoding the German codes, something which saved Britain. They killed him basically, driven to suicide. The Cameron prime minister said they're not going to apologize because Turing broke the law. He was guilty of the crime of homosexuality, which is a violation of law. This should be a major scandal. The United States for say research institutions like my own MIT, the way the problem is being dealt with. with is by a shift to more corporate funding. And that has several effects. And first of all, there's more emphasis on short-term applied work. So funding from, say, the Pentagon or the NIH, they're concerned with the long-term future of the advanced economy. That incidentally, it means also the profitability of the corporate sector, long afterwards. So, developed computers from the internet for a couple of decades, and it ends up being profitable for the private corporations that feed off it. That's the socializing costs, privatizing profit principle. Well, that's the government funding, Pentagon funding, for example. Very free. Best funder there is. I was funded by them for a long time. In contrast, a business firm that typically wants something it can use, and not its competitors. And it wants to be able to use it tomorrow. I don't know of a careful study, but it appears that the shift towards corporate funding, in fact, does lead to more short-term applied research, and less exploration of what might turn out to be interesting and valuable for the longer term future. And another consequence of the shift from, say, Pentagon funding to corporate funding is more secrecy. During the Pentagon-funded era at MIT, my, I haven't been a faculty student committee, which examined it carefully. Decades of Pentagon funding, there was no secrecy on campus. One exception was the political science department, but in the sciences, there was no secrecy. Literally true. They were involved in the Vietnam War. But, so not in the physics department, engineering departments, or else. That's not true today. Corporate funders cannot, of course, cannot force secrecy, but they have an indirect way of doing it. They can threaten non-renewable of contracts. That's led to some scambles, some of them severe enough to have landed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal involving MIT. Corporations can also have a considerable influence in other ways, corporations by their nature, the focus on profit making. That's what they're for. And they seek to convert as much of life as possible into commodities. So, a lot to say about this topic, couldn't have time. But one particular consequence is the focus on what's called efficiency. Now, efficiency is not a simple economic concept. It has quite crucial ideological dimensions. So, for example, if a business reduces personnel, it becomes more efficient by standard measures with lower costs. But quite typically, that shifts a burden to the public. It's a very familiar phenomenon. And the costs to the public are not counted. That's not a choice based on economic theory, but ideology. And that applies directly to the business models for the university. Increasing class size, using cheap temporary labor instead of full-time faculty, graduate students, for example, and other measures like that, may look good on university budgets. But significant costs are transferred to the students and to the society generally, as the quality of instructions affected. There's furthermore, no way to measure the human and the social costs of converting the schools and universities into facilities that produce commodities for the job market, abandoning the traditional ideal of the universities, encouraging creative and independent thought and inquiry, challenging received beliefs, exploring the horizons free of external constraints. It's an ideal that's undoubtedly been flawed in practice. But nevertheless, it is a kind of a measure of the level of civilization achieved. Well, there are related consequences for the K-12. There's a major assault on the public schools underway, and the main reason is the new spirit of the age. The public schools are based on a very dangerous principle. They're based on the principle that we care about one another. So for violation of the new spirit of the age. So, me, for example, I don't happen to have kids in the schools anymore, obviously. So why should I pay taxes? I mean, I'm not getting anything out of it. So therefore, let's get rid of public schools. Just do things for ourselves. The attack on social security has pretty much the same roots. It's based on the principle that you're supposed to care about the disabled widow across town. It's supposed to care if she doesn't have food to eat, say. There are various, so why should I care on doing fine? There are various pretexts offered, but they collapse very quickly on examination. The real source of these attacks on just humane values and public goods, I think, is the passionate effort to instill this hateful and destructive principle, this new spirit of the age from going on for 150 years, long before that in the attack on the commons. And that instilling it has enormous profits to concentrated private power, very harmful to human effects. There's a related campaign to destroy those parts of the educational system that enrich the lives of students and enable them to follow the string that's laid out for them in the Enlightenment Division of Education. That interferes with indoctrination, with control, with imposing passivity and obedience, with subordination to the principle of caring only about oneself. A major struggle about that right here is better than I do. The destruction of the flourishing Mexican-American studies program, and even the removal from classrooms of books that are used in that program, this is becoming a national scandal incidentally. Classics like Palafraire, the history of Chicanas and the Mexican civil rights movement, that looks like the. You're thinking in Columbus, even Shakespeare's campus, this is all reminiscent of presidents that we don't like to think about, but they're worth thinking about. And it's particularly dramatic that it's happening right here in the midst of what could properly be called occupied Mexico, conquered in the. You don't know, I don't think it went through, but it was conquered in the brutal war of aggression. Well, I don't know any simple answers to the dilemmas that constantly arise and trying to develop and sustain an educational system of independence and integrity, a one that strives for the enlightenment ideal. And to do this within societies that are dominated by concentrations of power with very different values and goals, but at least one thing seems clear enough, efforts to do this cannot progress very far in isolation from much broader struggles to protect what has already been achieved, and what has been achieved from severe ongoing attacks and to carry them forward towards a world of greater freedom and justice. Thanks. [Applause] [Music]