
How the Young Are Indoctrinated to Obey (2014) - YeGoblynQueenne
https://chomsky.info/20141201/
======
laughfactory
I agree that students of all grades are indoctrinated to obey and comply. And
that this is rooted in the establishments explicit desire to create ideal
assembly line workers.

But this analysis seems really muddled, confused, and all over the place. He
liberally attacks conservative politics, yet fails to make a case which
supports his assertions as to who is to blame.

I'd also disagree with his assessment of California as having had the best
educational system in the world. Wow. Really? Or his assessments that the
problem is enrollment freezes or reduced funding. Many other countries do
education cheaper, and more effectively.

I'd also argue that public education has, for nearly a century indoctrinated
students to be compliant and obedient. This isn't a new thing.

But this is the reason my wife and I will be homeschooling our kids. Not out
of a desire to indoctrinate them or whatever, but to save them from being
indoctrinated to be docile and subservient. I want our children to be free
thinkers, confident in themselves and capable of living outside the box
effectively.

~~~
wturner
Personally, the feeling imbued from my schooling in California is one of
neglect and indifference. "Indoctrination" assumes some kind of educating was
happening at all and would have been a step up actually.I'm speaking of the
formative middle and high school years.

------
jondubois
Schools condition us to accept social hierarchy and to fear authority - Both
of these are counter-productive to achieving success in real life.

I have spent much of my adult life trying to unlearn these lessons. It's
really hard work - Being compliant was practically part of my personality.

A side effect of this education which I carried into my professional life was
that I often ended up telling my bosses what they wanted to hear instead of
what they needed to hear - That might work in sales, but it's not great in
engineering. It was mostly because I had this deep seated fear of authority
and didn't want to upset them with my words.

Also, strangely, it seems that a lot of project managers tend to react more
negatively to cynical projections than actual missed deadlines... Which only
reinforces the pattern.

------
crb002
In the U.S. the problem is the Department of Education handing out billions of
loans creating artificial cashflow. Universities raise their tuition because
they know the student can squeeze the federal government out of an extra
$20,000.

End the loans and the tuition crisis will abate. Yes there will be turmoil as
professors making $200k go back to making $100k; but institutions will go back
to a true needs based financial aid where students once able to pay $20k in
loans above minimal amounts pay minimal amounts again and graduate debt free.

~~~
tomjakubowski
> Yes there will be turmoil as professors making $200k go back to making $100k

How many professors actually make $200k in salary, outside of medical/law
school schools?

The University of California has a salary schedule and, from what I know, they
stick to it pretty consistently. You need 12 years as a full professor before
you're making even $110k in salary. [http://www.ucop.edu/academic-personnel-
programs/_files/1617/...](http://www.ucop.edu/academic-personnel-
programs/_files/1617/t1.pdf)

~~~
johntran
[https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/](https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/)

There's literally 30 pages of UC Berkeley professors and admins making >$200k.

At UCI, the cost of living is less than Berkeley, but there are 650~ people
making that much.

~~~
greenyoda
Interesting database. At Berkeley, the 6 highest paid employees are all
coaches, with total pay of $2 million, $1.87 million, $1.8 million, $628K,
$560K and $560K. Their compensation seems to be mostly incentive-based, with
their "gross pay" far exceeding their "regular pay" \- maybe they get a cut of
the ticket revenue? Looks like sports is a big profit center for Berkeley.

UCLA's two top earners are also coaches ($3.5 and $2.7 million).

But this is not true for all the schools. At Davis, the highest paid employee
is the CEO of the Medical Center, who makes $1 million, with no coaches near
the top.

------
nobody_nowhere
Is it me, or does the title not match the argument put forth in the article? I
guess "Political currents affecting US education funding" didn't have a good
ring to it...

~~~
tantivy
It hinges on the interpretation of "indoctrination." I think we colloquially
use "indoctrination" to mean teaching people to consciously hear and repeat
rote beliefs, aware of them but trained not to question.

But Chomsky's use of the term "indoctrination" in this passage is subtler.
He's talking about instilling beliefs through confusion, omission, and
financial obligation, not inculcation.

~~~
bbarn
> inculcation

This is the third time in a week I've seen this word, or a tense of it. The
first time I had to look it up, as I'd never heard it before. Perhaps that's
irony since I grew up in the US school system, or perhaps the term is merely
gaining favor as of late?

~~~
ci5er
That's an example of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon[0]. The other uncovered-by-
the-article-at-the-link reason appears to have something to do with priming,
which means that your neurons are freshly acutely aware of that stimulus.

[0] [https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-
phenomeno...](https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon/)

------
Kluny
This essay reads like FUD. Gloomy statements are presented without context.

> Public education is under attack around the world, and in response, student
> protests have recently been held in Britain, Canada, Chile, Taiwan and
> elsewhere.

What protests are you referring to? When?

> The Los Angeles Times reports...

Link please.

> Similar defunding is under way nationwide.

Since when? I'm not saying he's wrong, but in what year did the federal
government last provide what you feel was an appropriate level of funding, and
what legislation or federal budget was the beginning of what you consider
"defunding"?

>... which was recently dealt yet another crushing blow by the collapse of the
housing bubble that was ignored on doctrinal grounds, triggering the current
financial crisis.

... The financial crisis that ended in ~2012? That one? This article appears
to be from 2014, how was it a "current" crisis?

> Justifications are offered on economic grounds, but are singularly
> unconvincing. In countries rich to poor, including Mexico next-door, tuition
> remains free or nominal.

This to me was the only interesting line in the article, in that it gave me
something new to think about.

> One illustration is the decision of state colleges to eliminate programs in
> nursing, engineering and computer science, because they are costly – and
> happen to be the professions where there is a labor shortage...

Source please?? That's a very bold statement, but a very interesting one if
it's true! However without a source I'm inclined to disregard it.

The whole thing reads like it was written by someone wearing a tinfoil hat,
and though there are a couple interesting points, it seems like this essay
will do more harm than good for his agenda. And just because Chomsky is famous
that doesn't make him so authoritative that he's excused from citing his
sources.

~~~
cokernel
>> Public education is under attack around the world, and in response, student
protests have recently been held in Britain, Canada, Chile, Taiwan and
elsewhere. >What protests are you referring to? When?

By using the search terms "student protests britain 2012" and varying the
third term to "canada", "chile", or "taiwan", I found the following:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_Kingdom_student_pr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_Kingdom_student_protests)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Quebec_student_protests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Quebec_student_protests)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011%E2%80%9313_Chilean_studen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011%E2%80%9313_Chilean_student_protests)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower_Student_Movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower_Student_Movement)

>> The Los Angeles Times reports... >Link please.

Chomsky quotes the following line from the article: "California State
University officials announced plans to freeze enrollment at most campuses."
By using that string as a search query I found

[http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/20/local/la-me-cal-
stat...](http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/20/local/la-me-cal-
state-20120320)

------
jMyles
> ...similar defunding is under way nationwide. “In most states,” The New York
> Times reports, “it is now tuition payments, not state appropriations, that
> cover most of the budget,” so that “the era of affordable four-year public
> universities, heavily subsidized by the state, may be over.”

Some people here on HN already know (I think?) of my 30 seconds of fame that
came from being targeted by SUNY for retaliation for my successful run for
Student Body President (chronicled in a video project called Campus Coup[0],
made by a bunch of us who were there).

But what you might not know is that during that time, I had the pleasure of
meeting and receiving the support from many of the brightest faculty (and
other) reformers of higher education. Their counsel helped me understand and
formulate the following conclusion:

A great move right now is to let the state continue to withdraw funding and at
the same time supplant its control over Student Union Buildings, Offices of
Residence Life, Offices of Academic Affairs, Academic Deans, and many other
areas where it exerts undue control and coercion.

The reality is that, at many of the most politically prominent campuses in the
USA - UConn, UMD, Cornell, and my alma mater, New Paltz, among many others -
all the best campus functions are being run by faculty or students already,
with relatively little management from state officials.

In my estimation, it's possible at each of these schools (and many others) to
eliminate or nearly eliminate 3-5 top Student and Academic affairs officials,
and their support staff, without anyone noticing for days or even weeks and
without any long-term negative impact. It is also likely possible to eliminate
their counterparts at the state level, ie SUNY SysAdmin.

This amounts to a savings of thousands of dollars per student per year in SUNY
- in fact, it makes it easy to imagine completely eliminating state
involvement at these schools. I'm not familiar with the numbers in the other
state systems.

It's a very exciting time to be an education activist; there are some
incredible students leaders on these campuses, and their level of
understanding and sophistication is far beyond what we demonstrated in
2005-2008.

The internet has fomented a culture of knowing every detail of budgeting and
recent history, and this has rendered a lot of what "administrators" used to
do irrelevant.

0:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lhBceaH_G4&list=PL11F04BB46...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lhBceaH_G4&list=PL11F04BB4661C2CC3)

~~~
maksimum
> In my estimation, it's possible at each of these schools (and many others)
> to eliminate or nearly eliminate 3-5 top Student and Academic affairs
> officials, and their support staff, without anyone noticing for days or even
> weeks and without any long-term negative impact.

The problem is that these administrators are loyal to the top of power pyramid
at the university (the president & the board of trustees), and conversely the
top relies on them for support and means of asserting its power. As a result
these midlevel administrators and deans enjoy protection from above.

Then the question is who can work through the motions to get rid of these
administrators? Undergrads only spend 4 years in school, doubtful they care
enough during their first two to participate in university politics. Grad
students and faculty have pressure to produce research, teach/TA, or get
tenure. Then you have the issue of incentives: administrators have much more
to loose compared to those who would prefer to get rid of them and save a few
$100s on tuition. As a result administrators will fight much harder than those
trying to get rid of them.

Realistically budget cuts mean class sizes increase by 20%, and students pay
more tuition (more work for the professors, less attention for the students
per dollar). Hopefully online universities continue to gain traction and
disrupt traditional schools.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
This was flagged. Is it really breaching the guidelines? If so, I'm sorry for
posting it.

I felt it's political alright but not quite "politics" (e.g., not discussing
specific people, or parties) and I felt that the subject (education) is
definitely of interest to HN readers. There has been a lot of interest in the
past in political subjects, like income distribution (universal wage etc),
training and education (coding bootcamps) and generally, issues of equality of
opportunities.

I particularly found this passage interesting to me and everyone who has
graduated from computer science, especially people from the US:

 _One illustration is the decision of state colleges to eliminate programs in
nursing, engineering and computer science, because they are costly – and
happen to be the professions where there is a labor shortage, as The New York
Times reports. The decision harms the society but conforms to the business
ideology of short-term gain without regard for human consequences, in accord
with the vile maxim._

Finally, I didn't think this is likely to cause much controversy, or start any
flame wars. I rather expected it to sink off the new entries page with nary an
upvote.

Also, I think I forgot to add the year in parens. Sorry about that, too.

~~~
srge
Thanks for posting it. I enjoyed this read a lot.

------
richev
The topic of fees vs grants (specifically in the UK) came up with a friend
over the holiday period. I wish I'd read this article earlier, and had had
this quote to hand:

“There has been a shift from the belief that we as a nation benefit from
higher education, to a belief that it’s the people receiving the education who
primarily benefit and so they should foot the bill,”

------
analog31
Oddly enough, I've heard this thing about indoctrination, yet I know a lot of
teachers, and not one of them has ever expressed such an objective. In fact,
most of them would oppose it fairly vigorously.

And I know plenty of people who got through public school without becoming
obedient or authoritarian, myself included.

It's certainly possible that some prominent people have expressed such a
thing, but connecting it with the actual conduct of education seems
problematic.

------
Swizec
Meh, my parents always indoctrinated me to disobey. All it got me was bad
grades and narrowed career prospects, and it got _them_ a lot of frustration.

But I turned out all right.

~~~
bitexploder
Isn't that kinda the point? Parenting is a huge guessing game with no
guarantees. It is hard to draw the regarding how much to respect authority.

~~~
smallnamespace
Maybe the point is that authority is neither inherently good nor bad, and the
best thing to teach is to have a nuanced response to it?

~~~
tantivy
The passage from Chomsky explicitly argues that institutions in the USA have
been, over the last half century, restructured to indebt and disenfranchise
young people while maximizing short-term material gains for the people in
charge of those institutions.

The point is that "authority" has sought to produce a populace that is not
capable of mustering a nuanced response to authority.

~~~
moxious
How do we suppose that authority got so sophisticated as to know how to do
this fancy indoctrination if they themselves are a product of it?

~~~
tantivy
They aren't. From the passage:

"That was true as well in the United States itself when it was a much poorer
country after World War II and huge numbers of students were able to enter
college under the GI bill – a factor in uniquely high economic growth, even
putting aside the significance in improving lives."

------
projektfu
The food is awful, and the portions are so small.

------
srge
Reading Chomsky is always a breadth of fresh air to my mind. Such a powerful
thinking that forces to see the world differently.

