The passage from Chomsky explicitly argues that institutions in the USA have been, over the last half century, restructured to indebt and disenfranchise young people while maximizing short-term material gains for the people in charge of those institutions.
The point is that "authority" has sought to produce a populace that is not capable of mustering a nuanced response to authority.
"That was true as well in the United States itself when it was a much poorer country after World War II and huge numbers of students were able to enter college under the GI bill – a factor in uniquely high economic growth, even putting aside the significance in improving lives."
The over-arching principle of Chomsky's political work is that systems of authority must always be required to justify themselves, and should be abandoned if they can't.
Is it me, or does the title not match the argument put forth in the article? I guess "Political currents affecting US education funding" didn't have a good ring to it...
Not only are you completely correct, I'm having a slightly difficult time understanding the purpose of the piece, exactly. Because it's not really only about education (some of it is about the finance sector, and relates only tangentially). It's about how Chomsky thinks profit motives lead to bad outcomes sometimes. Which is true, except a pareto-optimal social policy is _really hard_ and most law-makers at least attempt it already. So the criticism seems kind of hollow. "Capitalism As Practiced In America: Not Yielding Exclusively Positive Outcomes In All Aspects Of Life" is not something I would find particularly controversial, interesting, helpful, or insightful.
It hinges on the interpretation of "indoctrination." I think we colloquially use "indoctrination" to mean teaching people to consciously hear and repeat rote beliefs, aware of them but trained not to question.
But Chomsky's use of the term "indoctrination" in this passage is subtler. He's talking about instilling beliefs through confusion, omission, and financial obligation, not inculcation.
This is the third time in a week I've seen this word, or a tense of it. The first time I had to look it up, as I'd never heard it before. Perhaps that's irony since I grew up in the US school system, or perhaps the term is merely gaining favor as of late?
That's an example of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon[0]. The other uncovered-by-the-article-at-the-link reason appears to have something to do with priming, which means that your neurons are freshly acutely aware of that stimulus.
Here's one where he discusses education... training for stupidity and conformity, the contradictory need for creative independent innovators, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFf6_0T2ZoI
> ...similar defunding is under way nationwide. “In most states,” The New York Times reports, “it is now tuition payments, not state appropriations, that cover most of the budget,” so that “the era of affordable four-year public universities, heavily subsidized by the state, may be over.”
Some people here on HN already know (I think?) of my 30 seconds of fame that came from being targeted by SUNY for retaliation for my successful run for Student Body President (chronicled in a video project called Campus Coup[0], made by a bunch of us who were there).
But what you might not know is that during that time, I had the pleasure of meeting and receiving the support from many of the brightest faculty (and other) reformers of higher education. Their counsel helped me understand and formulate the following conclusion:
A great move right now is to let the state continue to withdraw funding and at the same time supplant its control over Student Union Buildings, Offices of Residence Life, Offices of Academic Affairs, Academic Deans, and many other areas where it exerts undue control and coercion.
The reality is that, at many of the most politically prominent campuses in the USA - UConn, UMD, Cornell, and my alma mater, New Paltz, among many others - all the best campus functions are being run by faculty or students already, with relatively little management from state officials.
In my estimation, it's possible at each of these schools (and many others) to eliminate or nearly eliminate 3-5 top Student and Academic affairs officials, and their support staff, without anyone noticing for days or even weeks and without any long-term negative impact. It is also likely possible to eliminate their counterparts at the state level, ie SUNY SysAdmin.
This amounts to a savings of thousands of dollars per student per year in SUNY - in fact, it makes it easy to imagine completely eliminating state involvement at these schools. I'm not familiar with the numbers in the other state systems.
It's a very exciting time to be an education activist; there are some incredible students leaders on these campuses, and their level of understanding and sophistication is far beyond what we demonstrated in 2005-2008.
The internet has fomented a culture of knowing every detail of budgeting and recent history, and this has rendered a lot of what "administrators" used to do irrelevant.
> In my estimation, it's possible at each of these schools (and many others) to eliminate or nearly eliminate 3-5 top Student and Academic affairs officials, and their support staff, without anyone noticing for days or even weeks and without any long-term negative impact.
The problem is that these administrators are loyal to the top of power pyramid at the university (the president & the board of trustees), and conversely the top relies on them for support and means of asserting its power. As a result these midlevel administrators and deans enjoy protection from above.
Then the question is who can work through the motions to get rid of these administrators? Undergrads only spend 4 years in school, doubtful they care enough during their first two to participate in university politics. Grad students and faculty have pressure to produce research, teach/TA, or get tenure. Then you have the issue of incentives: administrators have much more to loose compared to those who would prefer to get rid of them and save a few $100s on tuition. As a result administrators will fight much harder than those trying to get rid of them.
Realistically budget cuts mean class sizes increase by 20%, and students pay more tuition (more work for the professors, less attention for the students per dollar). Hopefully online universities continue to gain traction and disrupt traditional schools.
I agree that students of all grades are indoctrinated to obey and comply. And that this is rooted in the establishments explicit desire to create ideal assembly line workers.
But this analysis seems really muddled, confused, and all over the place. He liberally attacks conservative politics, yet fails to make a case which supports his assertions as to who is to blame.
I'd also disagree with his assessment of California as having had the best educational system in the world. Wow. Really? Or his assessments that the problem is enrollment freezes or reduced funding. Many other countries do education cheaper, and more effectively.
I'd also argue that public education has, for nearly a century indoctrinated students to be compliant and obedient. This isn't a new thing.
But this is the reason my wife and I will be homeschooling our kids. Not out of a desire to indoctrinate them or whatever, but to save them from being indoctrinated to be docile and subservient. I want our children to be free thinkers, confident in themselves and capable of living outside the box effectively.
Personally, the feeling imbued from my schooling in California is one of neglect and indifference. "Indoctrination" assumes some kind of educating was happening at all and would have been a step up actually.I'm speaking of the formative middle and high school years.
I wonder if there are stats on how many hours per year students at public schools spend lining up or waiting in line. Can we measure the impacts of 'disobedience' - what is the penalty at various levels of school for refusing to line up (maybe this is less of thing in the US than in UK-style schools)? You could also study the value of repeating back the exact words of the teacher and correlate that with grade performance or good behavior ratings. It may be immoral to do these experiments, but there should be some way to measure the amount of time on control vs learning happening in public schools.
There are many valid reasons to homeschool - wanting a first rate academic education, having children think for themselves, removing them from artificially controlling and overly magnified peer pressure, to better match learning rates and styles, avoid negative expectations of your cultural demographic, solve bullying or drug problems that cant be resolved through other means, focusing on a musical instrument or elite sport etc.
I'm not sure how best to address the converse problem - homeschool parents who _do_ seek to indoctrinate their children without giving them a wider view of societal norms. But I think its possible that parents can do that anyway, even if children _are_ attending school. I guess all parents [ and teachers ] do this to an extent, imparting a few bad memes along with the good ones is unavoidable in practice.. but hopefully averaged out by meeting other people. Maybe thats why things like travel and reading fiction and going to a distant university are so valuable - you get to compare your memeset with other peoples.
The topic of fees vs grants (specifically in the UK) came up with a friend over the holiday period. I wish I'd read this article earlier, and had had this quote to hand:
“There has been a shift from the belief that we as a nation benefit from higher education, to a belief that it’s the people receiving the education who primarily benefit and so they should foot the bill,”
In the U.S. the problem is the Department of Education handing out billions of loans creating artificial cashflow. Universities raise their tuition because they know the student can squeeze the federal government out of an extra $20,000.
End the loans and the tuition crisis will abate. Yes there will be turmoil as professors making $200k go back to making $100k; but institutions will go back to a true needs based financial aid where students once able to pay $20k in loans above minimal amounts pay minimal amounts again and graduate debt free.
> Yes there will be turmoil as professors making $200k go back to making $100k
How many professors actually make $200k in salary, outside of medical/law school schools?
The University of California has a salary schedule and, from what I know, they stick to it pretty consistently. You need 12 years as a full professor before you're making even $110k in salary. http://www.ucop.edu/academic-personnel-programs/_files/1617/...
Right. Administrative metastasis is the main cause of increasing costs, absolutely not increased spending on faculty salaries:
"Interestingly, increased spending has not been going into the pockets of the typical professor. Salaries of full-time faculty members are, on average, barely higher than they were in 1970. Moreover, while 45 years ago 78 percent of college and university professors were full time, today half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970."
Interesting database. At Berkeley, the 6 highest paid employees are all coaches, with total pay of $2 million, $1.87 million, $1.8 million, $628K, $560K and $560K. Their compensation seems to be mostly incentive-based, with their "gross pay" far exceeding their "regular pay" - maybe they get a cut of the ticket revenue? Looks like sports is a big profit center for Berkeley.
UCLA's two top earners are also coaches ($3.5 and $2.7 million).
But this is not true for all the schools. At Davis, the highest paid employee is the CEO of the Medical Center, who makes $1 million, with no coaches near the top.
This essay reads like FUD. Gloomy statements are presented without context.
> Public education is under attack around the world, and in response, student protests have recently been held in Britain, Canada, Chile, Taiwan and elsewhere.
What protests are you referring to? When?
> The Los Angeles Times reports...
Link please.
> Similar defunding is under way nationwide.
Since when? I'm not saying he's wrong, but in what year did the federal government last provide what you feel was an appropriate level of funding, and what legislation or federal budget was the beginning of what you consider "defunding"?
>... which was recently dealt yet another crushing blow by the collapse of the housing bubble that was ignored on doctrinal grounds, triggering the current financial crisis.
... The financial crisis that ended in ~2012? That one? This article appears to be from 2014, how was it a "current" crisis?
> Justifications are offered on economic grounds, but are singularly unconvincing. In countries rich to poor, including Mexico next-door, tuition remains free or nominal.
This to me was the only interesting line in the article, in that it gave me something new to think about.
> One illustration is the decision of state colleges to eliminate programs in nursing, engineering and computer science, because they are costly – and happen to be the professions where there is a labor shortage...
Source please?? That's a very bold statement, but a very interesting one if it's true! However without a source I'm inclined to disregard it.
The whole thing reads like it was written by someone wearing a tinfoil hat, and though there are a couple interesting points, it seems like this essay will do more harm than good for his agenda. And just because Chomsky is famous that doesn't make him so authoritative that he's excused from citing his sources.
>> Public education is under attack around the world, and in response, student protests have recently been held in Britain, Canada, Chile, Taiwan and elsewhere.
>What protests are you referring to? When?
By using the search terms "student protests britain 2012" and varying the third term to "canada", "chile", or "taiwan", I found the following:
Chomsky quotes the following line from the article: "California State University officials announced plans to freeze enrollment at most campuses." By using that string as a search query I found
Schools condition us to accept social hierarchy and to fear authority - Both of these are counter-productive to achieving success in real life.
I have spent much of my adult life trying to unlearn these lessons. It's really hard work - Being compliant was practically part of my personality.
A side effect of this education which I carried into my professional life was that I often ended up telling my bosses what they wanted to hear instead of what they needed to hear - That might work in sales, but it's not great in engineering. It was mostly because I had this deep seated fear of authority and didn't want to upset them with my words.
Also, strangely, it seems that a lot of project managers tend to react more negatively to cynical projections than actual missed deadlines... Which only reinforces the pattern.
Oddly enough, I've heard this thing about indoctrination, yet I know a lot of teachers, and not one of them has ever expressed such an objective. In fact, most of them would oppose it fairly vigorously.
And I know plenty of people who got through public school without becoming obedient or authoritarian, myself included.
It's certainly possible that some prominent people have expressed such a thing, but connecting it with the actual conduct of education seems problematic.
This was flagged. Is it really breaching the guidelines? If so, I'm sorry for posting it.
I felt it's political alright but not quite "politics" (e.g., not discussing specific people, or parties) and I felt that the subject (education) is definitely of interest to HN readers. There has been a lot of interest in the past in political subjects, like income distribution (universal wage etc), training and education (coding bootcamps) and generally, issues of equality of opportunities.
I particularly found this passage interesting to me and everyone who has graduated from computer science, especially people from the US:
One illustration is the decision of state colleges to eliminate programs in nursing, engineering and computer science, because they are costly – and happen to be the professions where there is a labor shortage, as The New York Times reports. The decision harms the society but conforms to the business ideology of short-term gain without regard for human consequences, in accord with the vile maxim.
Finally, I didn't think this is likely to cause much controversy, or start any flame wars. I rather expected it to sink off the new entries page with nary an upvote.
Also, I think I forgot to add the year in parens. Sorry about that, too.
39 comments
[ 2834 ms ] story [ 1718 ms ] threadBut I turned out all right.
The point is that "authority" has sought to produce a populace that is not capable of mustering a nuanced response to authority.
"That was true as well in the United States itself when it was a much poorer country after World War II and huge numbers of students were able to enter college under the GI bill – a factor in uniquely high economic growth, even putting aside the significance in improving lives."
Someone perform a sentiment analysis and put some numbers to this fact.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=chomsky
I wonder why anyone would suppose my hypothesis is based on a mere 8 comments.
But Chomsky's use of the term "indoctrination" in this passage is subtler. He's talking about instilling beliefs through confusion, omission, and financial obligation, not inculcation.
This is the third time in a week I've seen this word, or a tense of it. The first time I had to look it up, as I'd never heard it before. Perhaps that's irony since I grew up in the US school system, or perhaps the term is merely gaining favor as of late?
[0] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomeno...
Some people here on HN already know (I think?) of my 30 seconds of fame that came from being targeted by SUNY for retaliation for my successful run for Student Body President (chronicled in a video project called Campus Coup[0], made by a bunch of us who were there).
But what you might not know is that during that time, I had the pleasure of meeting and receiving the support from many of the brightest faculty (and other) reformers of higher education. Their counsel helped me understand and formulate the following conclusion:
A great move right now is to let the state continue to withdraw funding and at the same time supplant its control over Student Union Buildings, Offices of Residence Life, Offices of Academic Affairs, Academic Deans, and many other areas where it exerts undue control and coercion.
The reality is that, at many of the most politically prominent campuses in the USA - UConn, UMD, Cornell, and my alma mater, New Paltz, among many others - all the best campus functions are being run by faculty or students already, with relatively little management from state officials.
In my estimation, it's possible at each of these schools (and many others) to eliminate or nearly eliminate 3-5 top Student and Academic affairs officials, and their support staff, without anyone noticing for days or even weeks and without any long-term negative impact. It is also likely possible to eliminate their counterparts at the state level, ie SUNY SysAdmin.
This amounts to a savings of thousands of dollars per student per year in SUNY - in fact, it makes it easy to imagine completely eliminating state involvement at these schools. I'm not familiar with the numbers in the other state systems.
It's a very exciting time to be an education activist; there are some incredible students leaders on these campuses, and their level of understanding and sophistication is far beyond what we demonstrated in 2005-2008.
The internet has fomented a culture of knowing every detail of budgeting and recent history, and this has rendered a lot of what "administrators" used to do irrelevant.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lhBceaH_G4&list=PL11F04BB46...
The problem is that these administrators are loyal to the top of power pyramid at the university (the president & the board of trustees), and conversely the top relies on them for support and means of asserting its power. As a result these midlevel administrators and deans enjoy protection from above.
Then the question is who can work through the motions to get rid of these administrators? Undergrads only spend 4 years in school, doubtful they care enough during their first two to participate in university politics. Grad students and faculty have pressure to produce research, teach/TA, or get tenure. Then you have the issue of incentives: administrators have much more to loose compared to those who would prefer to get rid of them and save a few $100s on tuition. As a result administrators will fight much harder than those trying to get rid of them.
Realistically budget cuts mean class sizes increase by 20%, and students pay more tuition (more work for the professors, less attention for the students per dollar). Hopefully online universities continue to gain traction and disrupt traditional schools.
But this analysis seems really muddled, confused, and all over the place. He liberally attacks conservative politics, yet fails to make a case which supports his assertions as to who is to blame.
I'd also disagree with his assessment of California as having had the best educational system in the world. Wow. Really? Or his assessments that the problem is enrollment freezes or reduced funding. Many other countries do education cheaper, and more effectively.
I'd also argue that public education has, for nearly a century indoctrinated students to be compliant and obedient. This isn't a new thing.
But this is the reason my wife and I will be homeschooling our kids. Not out of a desire to indoctrinate them or whatever, but to save them from being indoctrinated to be docile and subservient. I want our children to be free thinkers, confident in themselves and capable of living outside the box effectively.
There are many valid reasons to homeschool - wanting a first rate academic education, having children think for themselves, removing them from artificially controlling and overly magnified peer pressure, to better match learning rates and styles, avoid negative expectations of your cultural demographic, solve bullying or drug problems that cant be resolved through other means, focusing on a musical instrument or elite sport etc.
I'm not sure how best to address the converse problem - homeschool parents who _do_ seek to indoctrinate their children without giving them a wider view of societal norms. But I think its possible that parents can do that anyway, even if children _are_ attending school. I guess all parents [ and teachers ] do this to an extent, imparting a few bad memes along with the good ones is unavoidable in practice.. but hopefully averaged out by meeting other people. Maybe thats why things like travel and reading fiction and going to a distant university are so valuable - you get to compare your memeset with other peoples.
“There has been a shift from the belief that we as a nation benefit from higher education, to a belief that it’s the people receiving the education who primarily benefit and so they should foot the bill,”
End the loans and the tuition crisis will abate. Yes there will be turmoil as professors making $200k go back to making $100k; but institutions will go back to a true needs based financial aid where students once able to pay $20k in loans above minimal amounts pay minimal amounts again and graduate debt free.
How many professors actually make $200k in salary, outside of medical/law school schools?
The University of California has a salary schedule and, from what I know, they stick to it pretty consistently. You need 12 years as a full professor before you're making even $110k in salary. http://www.ucop.edu/academic-personnel-programs/_files/1617/...
"Interestingly, increased spending has not been going into the pockets of the typical professor. Salaries of full-time faculty members are, on average, barely higher than they were in 1970. Moreover, while 45 years ago 78 percent of college and university professors were full time, today half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970."
- https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-r...
There's literally 30 pages of UC Berkeley professors and admins making >$200k.
At UCI, the cost of living is less than Berkeley, but there are 650~ people making that much.
UCLA's two top earners are also coaches ($3.5 and $2.7 million).
But this is not true for all the schools. At Davis, the highest paid employee is the CEO of the Medical Center, who makes $1 million, with no coaches near the top.
> Public education is under attack around the world, and in response, student protests have recently been held in Britain, Canada, Chile, Taiwan and elsewhere.
What protests are you referring to? When?
> The Los Angeles Times reports...
Link please.
> Similar defunding is under way nationwide.
Since when? I'm not saying he's wrong, but in what year did the federal government last provide what you feel was an appropriate level of funding, and what legislation or federal budget was the beginning of what you consider "defunding"?
>... which was recently dealt yet another crushing blow by the collapse of the housing bubble that was ignored on doctrinal grounds, triggering the current financial crisis.
... The financial crisis that ended in ~2012? That one? This article appears to be from 2014, how was it a "current" crisis?
> Justifications are offered on economic grounds, but are singularly unconvincing. In countries rich to poor, including Mexico next-door, tuition remains free or nominal.
This to me was the only interesting line in the article, in that it gave me something new to think about.
> One illustration is the decision of state colleges to eliminate programs in nursing, engineering and computer science, because they are costly – and happen to be the professions where there is a labor shortage...
Source please?? That's a very bold statement, but a very interesting one if it's true! However without a source I'm inclined to disregard it.
The whole thing reads like it was written by someone wearing a tinfoil hat, and though there are a couple interesting points, it seems like this essay will do more harm than good for his agenda. And just because Chomsky is famous that doesn't make him so authoritative that he's excused from citing his sources.
By using the search terms "student protests britain 2012" and varying the third term to "canada", "chile", or "taiwan", I found the following:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_Kingdom_student_pr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Quebec_student_protests
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011%E2%80%9313_Chilean_studen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower_Student_Movement
>> The Los Angeles Times reports... >Link please.
Chomsky quotes the following line from the article: "California State University officials announced plans to freeze enrollment at most campuses." By using that string as a search query I found
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/20/local/la-me-cal-stat...
I have spent much of my adult life trying to unlearn these lessons. It's really hard work - Being compliant was practically part of my personality.
A side effect of this education which I carried into my professional life was that I often ended up telling my bosses what they wanted to hear instead of what they needed to hear - That might work in sales, but it's not great in engineering. It was mostly because I had this deep seated fear of authority and didn't want to upset them with my words.
Also, strangely, it seems that a lot of project managers tend to react more negatively to cynical projections than actual missed deadlines... Which only reinforces the pattern.
And I know plenty of people who got through public school without becoming obedient or authoritarian, myself included.
It's certainly possible that some prominent people have expressed such a thing, but connecting it with the actual conduct of education seems problematic.
I felt it's political alright but not quite "politics" (e.g., not discussing specific people, or parties) and I felt that the subject (education) is definitely of interest to HN readers. There has been a lot of interest in the past in political subjects, like income distribution (universal wage etc), training and education (coding bootcamps) and generally, issues of equality of opportunities.
I particularly found this passage interesting to me and everyone who has graduated from computer science, especially people from the US:
One illustration is the decision of state colleges to eliminate programs in nursing, engineering and computer science, because they are costly – and happen to be the professions where there is a labor shortage, as The New York Times reports. The decision harms the society but conforms to the business ideology of short-term gain without regard for human consequences, in accord with the vile maxim.
Finally, I didn't think this is likely to cause much controversy, or start any flame wars. I rather expected it to sink off the new entries page with nary an upvote.
Also, I think I forgot to add the year in parens. Sorry about that, too.