adminDan Falcone and Saul Isaacson Correspondents
Washington DC-based History Teacher Dan Falcone and New York City English Teacher Saul Isaacson sat down with Professor Noam Chomsky to discuss current issues in education and American domestic and foreign policy issues. They also discussed the place of the humanities in education and how it relates to activism, definitions of terrorism, and how education impacts the perceptions of the political process in the US.
Dan Falcone: We are here again at MIT to discuss education, history, and politics with Noam Chomsky. Thank you for having us. I was just wondering if you could discuss some of the challenges you hear from the friends you have in the educational field?
Noam Chomsky: A friend of mine was doing some interesting work in Falmouth. He works in a Falmouth school system. He was a Harvard cognitive scientist, but he’s now working with the schools. He started working with the kids that they have in a special track. I forget what they call it, but the ones who aren’t academically functioning. And when he began to look into it, he found that these kids come to school on a bus with maybe an hour bus ride. They haven’t had breakfast. But when they come into school they go crazy and he started doing some really simple things like giving them candy because he discovered that they have a low glucose level. And that’s having an effect, and when they come into school instead of starting in a math class, he just puts them somewhere where they can just go crazy and run around.
He’s gotten to the point that these kids are out-performing the main kids in the main schools.
Dan Falcone: Interesting, so just through simple techniques he’s been able to help these students. Shifting gears, I wanted to ask you about the place of the humanities in education. So, on the one hand I see this need to foster creativity and challenge prevailing business models of education or narrowing the technocratic mould of education –
Noam Chomsky: I’ll give you an answer. This morning’s MIT newspaper has a wonderful article about the destruction of education in the United States but they are very upbeat about it. Take a look at the new majors.
Dan Falcone: MIT introduces four new majors, seven new minors. Business analytics, finance, mathematical economics, minor in computer science design, entrepreneurship.
Noam Chomsky: The four majors: Business first management, business analytics, finance, mathematical economics, which is trading. That’s it.
Dan Falcone: Yeah, I’ve seen this type of thinking before. The school that I’m in now is changing the department. It’s including more advanced placement test-driven subjects whereas it used to be a place where you could go to.
Noam Chomsky: Think about things.
Dan Falcone: Yes, so the other reason I bring it up, is the other side of the humanities debate with critical theory and cultural studies, where there’s a tendency for the humanities to reject forms of objectivity or to deny truth as sort of this trendy, fashionable, academic entity whereby it winds up reinforcing power or does little in the way of contributing to activism. Could you comment on that?
Noam Chomsky: It’s bad enough here but the place where it’s even more destructive is in the Third World because here, if intellectuals just waste their time, okay, it matters, but it might not matter that much. But in Third World countries they need intellectual contributions more proportionately.
I have seen some amazing cases. I once gave a talk at Birzeit, the Palestinian college in the West Bank, and a Palestinian friend of mine was sitting in the audience.
They wanted me to talk about the current political situation and so I talked about it and as we walked out I asked my friend what his feeling was about the audience reaction (to the talk), and he said he was sitting next to a student that didn’t like it much.
She said it was all about this kind of old-fashioned (naïve) business of embracing truth and fact and that is not what is really important. And you see that all over the Third World. It’s a very destructive tendency. And it’s also intellectually just pure garbage.
Dan Falcone: Right, and a lot of times it’s well intentioned, left-leaning people.
Noam Chomsky: People are well intentioned but I think if you look at the roots of it — it’s very cynical. It mostly comes from Paris and I think it mostly has to do with the collapse of French civilisation. France has not been able to come to terms with the fact that it’s not a major power anymore. I mean even before the Second World War, Paris was one of the main centres of intellectual and cultural life. But now Paris is a kind of subsidiary of Germany, their traditional enemy and they can’t come to terms with it.
They have tried to create one crazy thing after another to try to be exciting, each one more lunatic than the last, and this is one of them. And it’s picked up here in mostly literature departments and some humanities departments. It kind of gives the impression of being serious. Like you use big words and you have complicated sentences and there’s things nobody can understand, so we must be like physicists because I can’t understand them and they can’t understand me.
Back to the previous point you raise regarding the business model; at a place like MIT, it’s really shocking because this used to be a research university. The idea that what’s driving kids is how can I make money is just devastating, even more so the fact that there’s no comment about it.
Look at the comment of the dean (in the MIT press). He thinks it’s great.
Dan Falcone: How do students react to this?
Noam Chomsky: (The new majors and course selections) just came out this morning (in the MIT press) and I mentioned it in a class this morning. They kind of thought about it but I don’t think they would have reacted to it otherwise.
Dan Falcone: I recently saw a friend of yours speak in DC, Phyllis Bennis, from Institute for Policy Studies who participated in Democracy Awakening. I was also talking to Medea Benjamin. They were both giving a talk on resistance, peace, organisation, and getting money out of politics. The one quote they gave was from Charles Freeman. He’s an American diplomat. You don’t normally hear those two quoting diplomats but his quote is, “The United States has now been engaged in a cold war with Iran, Persia, for 37 years. It’s conducted various levels of hot war in Iraq for 26 years. It has been in combat in Afghanistan for 15. America has bombed Somalia for 15 years, Libya for five and Syria for one and a half years. One has led to another. None has yielded any positive result and none shows any signs of doing so. In none of these wars is there an end in sight.” This is not to mention the Israeli crimes that we fully support.
Noam Chomsky: It’s interesting from him because he’s quite conservative, but he’s a kind of an old-fashioned, mainstream establishment figure. He’s been an ambassador for many years. His attitudes are pretty reactionary. When he says it “hasn’t yielded any positive result” he means for us. We maybe, destroyed them but who cares about that, no positive result for us. So the fact that people like him are saying it, and he’s very well respected, has meaning. Another one is Andrew Bacevich. He’s a military historian. He’s also quite conservative but he’s considered a leftist because he says this from the US perspective.
Dan Falcone: It made me think about the global war on terror and I started looking at a textbook and the definition as outlined by the curriculum I use. I also tried to trace it back to see what students were learning previously about terrorism in terms of our global war on terror as defined by the United States, United Kingdom and NATO as “us against a force somewhere else.”
But could you just talk about how that definition is complicated and how it isn’t complicated. You traced it since the early ’80s and so it’s a pretty reliable definition in the context you wrote it.
Noam Chomsky: Yeah, Reagan started it. It’s pretty interesting. I mean terror became a big issue when the Reagan Administration came in. They immediately announced (their plans) and kind of disparaged Carter’s alleged human rights programmes. The main issue is state-directed international terrorism. Right at that time that big industry developed. That’s when you start getting the academic departments on terrorism. You get UN conferences trying to define terrorism. Journals, you know, big explosion of interest in terrorism. I started writing about it more at that time as did Ed Herman. But we actually had been writing about it before and we picked up after that.
But the stuff that we write can’t enter the canon for a very simple reason. We use the official definitions of terrorism. The definitions in the US code, in British law, in US Army manuals and so on. And if you use those definitions, it follows instantly that the United States is the leading terrorist state in the world.
So since you can’t have that conclusion you have to do something else. And if you look at all this academic work in the conferences and so on, there’s a constant theme that terrorism is extremely hard to define and we therefore have to have a deep thinking about it. And the reason it’s hard to define is quite simple. It’s hard to find a definition that includes what they do to us but excludes what we do to them. That’s quite difficult. So it takes a global war on terrorism.
The worst terrorist crimes going on right now are the drone campaigns. But you can’t include that obviously. So you have to try to define it. I mean if Iran was carrying out an assassination campaign killing anyone around the world who Iran thought might harm them someday we’d go crazy. But that’s the drone campaign.
There’s been a big problem now, for 35 years, in trying to define a way to restrict the concept of terrorism to things that those guys are doing to us. Take a look at the Supreme Court decision that just authorised an effort by US claimants against Iran for terrorist acts. What are the terrorist acts? The terrorist acts are bombings of US military installations in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, which Iran is claimed to have something to do with. Well suppose they did. That’s not terrorism. I mean if we have a military base in Lebanon that while we’re shelling Lebanese naval ships, the Navy is shelling Lebanese installations and somebody attacks (that’s not terrorism). — COunterpunch
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