Chomsky on Mis-Education

elite elements based in the business community control the state by virtue of their dominance of the private society,

Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States,

Tom Paxton’s song “What Did You Learn in School Today?”:

Accordingly, it must create educational structures that involve “practices by which one strives to domesticate consciousness, transforming it into an empty receptacle. Education in cultural action for domination is reduced to a situation in which the educator as ‘the one who knows’ transfers existing knowledge to the learner as ‘the one who does not know.’

State Departments of Education reassert their control over the curriculum via mandated standardized tests, this form of mindless skills-based education is gaining more currency as tests guide teaching while “learning that address [es] the relationship of the self to public life, social responsibility to the broader demands of citizenship,”10 is sidelined.

Noam Chomsky, the term democracy “refers to a system of government in which elite elements based in the business community control the state by virtue of their dominance of the private society, while the population observes quietly. So understood, democracy is a system of elite decision and public ratification, as in the United States itself. Correspondingly, popular involvement in the formation of public policy is considered a serious threat.”2