Noam Chomsky The Purpose of Education
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdNAUJWJN08
1) Chomsky states that education is for open investigation along the student's own lines, not for indoctrination.
2) When it comes to internet, he reverses it totally.
If one hasn't got a "proper framework" (and young students are not suppoed to have it unless cleared as having such by their professors), though one should be willing to ask if it is the right one (but that is safest to leave to professors) the internet can harm more than help (so let's replace educational freedom with doctrine).
I do however owe Chomsky. For his good history of English from Chaucer to Standard US. Or if that was by a disciple of his, it is still good and in a way his merit.
I also owe him for the amusing, though in my view inaccurate, view about meaning being determined by temporal position in word order in an idealised way.
Acc. to Chomsky, if I get him right, the "underlying" structure of any cria on "er hatte ihn lieb" is:
A) [daß, wenn, etc.] er ihn lieb hatte.
This can change in relatives to:
B) den er [ihn=den] lieb hatte
C) der [er=der] ihn lieb hatte
D) hatte er ihn lieb [hatte=hatte]
E) er hatte [er=er] ihn lieb [hatte=hatte].
The last being of course the usual position in main clauses.
If this explains the meaning, rather than forms like nom sg = indic sg > acc or lieb being in "predicative case" how does Chomsky analyse an example like this:
- Und der gute Dieb
- Erfur daß ihn lieb
- Hatte der Herr, des Davids Sohn.
It has a surface and deep structure like:
F) daß [er=er] ihn lieb hatte ["er"=] der Herr.
No, I find it more credible that meaning is determined by forms like er and ihn for difference between subject and object, that word order in usual sequence can help, especially in "cases" where both nom and acc nouns are nom/acc ambiguous, that adjective is used as pred. by non-suffix
And that lieb is an AdjP qualifying BOTH V and NP of VP.
So, if I think Chomsky's grammar is less informing (except perhaps for purposes of pragmatic use, since inversions of typical order do contribute to how a sentence strikes one) than traditional one, if furthermore I think he was wrong in discovering the most typical innate grammar in the pidgins, which got their grammar as McWhorter said, from slaves held in Africa teaching slaves meant for Transatlantic sale English vocabulary with their own grammar underlying, he has intrigued me. I owe him.
But owing someone does not mean one cannot disagree when he is very wrong.
I do agree:
- higher education should encourage one to look further than one's models if possible;
- higher education should not be about passing exams.
Nor should any education be that.
But they should be about the acquired knowledge or know-how which also helps you pass exams.
An exam can show if you have read a book, but it is reading it which is educational for you. As CSL once remarked (Lilies that Fester?)
I do not agree that education needs to be or even can achieve being non-indoctrinational, totally.
Nor do I believe vocational training has not been unduly neglected.
If a boy feels he is a man at fourteen and wants a wife and children, he should have had the opportunity to have learnt how to shepherd or mend fishing nets or weave or knit or make macramé or play songs that people pay to hear well before fourteen.
But that does not mean higher education should be rebooted into vocational one.
But there is a real disagreement on who is unduly stifling the creativity of learning and who is not.
He has come full circle from the Enlightenment.
They would call Jesuit schools places of indoctrination and claim they wanted full freedom of research, but when someone does these days get more freedom of research than Chomsky likes, he calls their opportunity a cult generator.
He mentions that going through a library of biology will not make one a good biologist if one does not know what to look for.
But it is not just meaning of language which we have an innate capacity for. It is also - and that is how language is learnt - constructing meaning as facts come along.
Chomsky feels we should know what we are looking for and have an open mind about the framework.
I feel his open mind about the framwork is really lip service, unless unstructured research is permitted and encouraged.
The best way to judge whether something is real or not is to have lots of real knowledge about reality.
The best way to get it is to welcome any piece of knowledge you can get. And the best way to do so, is not to concentrate on what one is looking for but to welcome anything that may come along. Unless you have a particular reason to reject it.
That is how I was self taught, and I think it worked.
He may feel it did not work: that I became a cultist. If he is right, it was at least not through internet, that only gave me an opportunity of expression, and of correcting some of my first hunches insofar as I saw them in need of correction, but by reading. [Books, printed such, on paper] His "ban" on unstructured research in the end means a ban on libraries.
His example of biology seems to me to hint at his view of creationism, as something proper to cultists.
I may not be an ace on biology, but I do know the laws of Mendel, I do know what chromosomes are, I do know what telomeres and centromeres are, and I do know they pose a problem to evolutionism. One that P. Z. Myers has "solved" only insofar as he is fine with "new chromosome pairs" being telocentric ones.
One where I debated under his blog post about his solution, and where I was told to ask expertise, did ask medical such and was told I should of course have asked an evolutionary biologist.
He has - at least from the computers I access - hid comments on that post if posterior to 2009. It was in 2011 that I started posting and debating in that comment section.
I feel it is all right that a Jesuit school should transmit the Catholic answer to the 124 questions in St Peter Canisius' Catechism. But in return Jews are free to open schools for Jews, where the wrong answer to a lot of them is transmitted.
In the modern system, all believers and non-believers are supposed to be welcome, supposed to be taught an open mind, but are really educated within a system as closed as, if not more than the system of the Jesuit school or the Yeshiva.
The Jesuit school may have taught some to label Jews Kikes - or the propensity of its pupils to strike a young boy named Noam because he was Jewish may have come from elsewhere than from the teachers. The Yeshiva may have taught some to label non-Jews Goyim va Minim.
The Modern System is teaching to label for instance a Creationist and Geocentric as a Cultist. And with Noam Chomsky we get as high as we can in tracking where that comes from.
Right in this video he is doing it.
Unless of course he meant something quite different from Creationism.
But is for instance 9-11-trutherdom really so stupid that one can honestly label it a cult?
It brought on a war some people wanted for other reasons even before the Taliban had been oppressing any Christians, since they were "backward".
It brought on New World Order - like Air Port Tyranny ([expression] courtesy of Mgr Williamson) or non-terrorist Muslims running ENFORCED security all over France (big cities, anyway).
This was posted here by, at, in:
Hans-Georg Lundahl
BpI Georges Pompidou, Paris
Pentecost Sunday
19-V-2013
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