Subversive education
Noam Chomsky on Wednesday joined Bruno della Chiesa, a visiting lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), in an Askwith Forum covering the legacy of the radical Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921-1997) and his 1968 book, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” The conversation was moderated by Professor Howard Gardner. The book, said Chomsky, linguistics professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sought to overturn the educational status quo that Freire saw as “a banking system” in which teachers deposited knowledge into the passive brains of students. “The scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits,” Freire wrote. And not much has changed since, said Chomsky: “Teaching to test, that’s our education system.” According to Chomsky, a giant in linguistics whose outspoken leftism has been a mark of his decades-long career, Freire viewed learning as a critical dialogue between teacher and students,...