Noam Chomsky: Modern universities designed to ‘deprive you of your freedom’
The World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) released an interview with Noam Chomsky recently in which the noted linguist discussed, among other things, how high student tuition indoctrinates students into corporate culture.
“There’s no economic basis for high tuitions,” Chomsky said. “One of the very negative aspects of this sharp tuition rise is that it entraps students. It deprives them of their freedom.”
Chomsky explained that “if you’re going to come out of college with $50,000 of debt, you’re stuck. You couldn’t do the things you wanted to do, like maybe you wanted to become a public interest lawyer, helping poor people. You can’t do it — you have to go to a corporate law firm, pay off your debt. Then you get trapped in that.”
“In fact,” he continued, “one of the main effects of the sharp increase in tuition is just indoctrination and control.”
When WISE asked him about the role of technology in the classroom, he said “watching something online is nothing like being a classroom. The Internet is like other technology: it can be used to liberate, to learn, to study [or] it can be used to divert people to meaningless activities, to indoctrinate them, to overwhelm them with propaganda, commercial or political.”
Watch WISE’s entire interview with Noam Chomsky below.