[.ca] Chomsky on Mis-Education (ISBN 0742501299)

Simply Great:
In On Mis-Education, the noted activist and scholar Noam Chomsky puts forth a well reasoned analysis of the failure of public eduction in America. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that many americans do not even know how many states are in the United States, or even who their senator or even president is (not that the last matters very much). On the contrary these same citizens can tell you countless bits of information on even the most obscure of Hollywood personalities. The failure that this represents, however, is not completely the fault of the people themselves, although they do bear a vurden for their own lack of intellectual curiosity, it is primarily due to the conserted and intense barage of mindless drivel constantly transmited through our media outlests and schools. In this era of information, TV is often seen as the fountain of truth and as the previous review shows, this is not an all too uncommon thing. Fortunately for us, Chomsky lays it all out and exposes how the media shapes what passes for knowledge in today's world, which comes down to a simple equation of profit and cost.

I'm a Chomsky fan, but this book is a swindle:
I should say that I'm a fan of Chomsky's logical approach to political and historical criticism, but I'm afraid the title of this book is misleading. The book claims to be Noam Chomsky's view of education, but only 21 pages (out of 188) focus on Chomsky's ideas regarding education, and even that portion is merely a transcript of an interview in which Chomsky talks for about 16 pages. The rest of the book gives a basic overview of Chomsky's ideas on propaganda. That would be fine if the book was called 'Chomsky on Propaganda, with some notes on Mis-Education', but it isn't. At a list price of over twenty dollars, I find this book to be overpriced. Chomsky's books are never cheap (and are often beyond the budget of many who might find Chomsky's ideas interesting), but this one is far too expensive considering what the title lead me to believe it was.

Misleading title:
Chomsky and Macedo should have known better: the title of their book is misleading. It should of been titled "Chomsky on Mis-Political Education." I don't have a problem with Chomsky's political analysis, but I was expecting him to talk more about the public and private school system in this country. He only does this in the first chapter, and then rest of this short book focuses on what Chomsky knows best: domestic and international politics. A better book on this subject is "Educating the 'Right' Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality," by Micheal W. Apple.

Low-grade polemic:
Even by the inexacting standards of adversarial polemic, this is not an impressive book. It consists of a few disjointed chapters, only one of which could be said to hold relevance to the book's title, but all of them espousing Chomsky's customary animadversions on the alleged iniquities of the United States. Those judgements are, to put it minimally, eccentric. The first chapter is nominally related to the title of the book, but it has precious little to do with the content and nature of education. Whereas Cardinal Newman, for example, wrote eloquently about knowledge and its independent justification, Chomsky is content merely to propound anti-American themes that are meant to be contrarian but come across as perverse in an adolescent sort of way. Chomsky claims to perceive indoctrination (not subjectivity, or even bias, mind, but indoctrination) at the heart of American education. His standards of proof for this claim are comically inept. A 12-year old child, maintaining that in America there was not 'liberty and justice for all', was disciplined for refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. According to Chomsky, this child - who sounds to have been quite a prig - is the voice of singular and unexceptionable reason, whereas the rest of us are the victims of indoctrination for not seeing the child's point. How to explain something to the incurably literal-minded? Leaving aside the fact - the demonstrable, admirable fact - that the United States is the freest, fairest, and most just society in history, founded on liberal political rights and the rule of law, a declaration of national allegiance is not a scientific thesis. As an Englishman, I am a subject of Her Majesty the Queen; I do not believe that political authority literally rests in her and that such rights as I possess are granted by her. The obvious ought not to need stating, but here goes anyway: subjects of the constitutional monarchies of western Europe are immeasurably freer than were the 'citizens' of the former 'people's republics' of eastern Europe. The rest of the book is no more perceptive than the opening - with one shining exception. Included in the book is a rather dated debate between Chomsky and John Silber about the role of the United States in the world. The exception I allude to is, of course, Silber's own contribution, which is a model of lucid and humane advocacy. Silber is one of those hard-headed liberals who has never believed that sympathy with Third World dictatorships and visceral hostility to free societies are part of the liberal tradition, and he sensibly allows Chomsky to skewer himself by displaying precisely those characteristics. One example of such idiosyncrasy among so many will suffice. Chomsky asserts that 'our terrorist war' against Cuba 'had nothing to do with Communism'. Instead it was due to - yes, really - Castro's welfare programmes. In the Chomskyian world view, the US was concerned that these programmes served the poor and would thereby enhance the attractiveness of the revolutionary cause beyond Cuba. Where does one begin in reasoning with such fantasy? Perhaps Chomsky would dismiss the evidence of penury in Cuba as capitalist propaganda, but surely not even he could maintain that the US did not have reasonable concerns about her security when Khrushchev initiated the Cuba missile crisis. As J.L.Gaddis's history of the early Cold War, _We Now Know_, recounts, Castro did everything in his power to persuade Khrushchev - who was frightened out of his wits by such fanaticism - to launch the missiles at the United States. And, contrary to the impression one might get from reading Professor Chomsky's accounts of the benign nature of Third World tyrannies, the warheads were not filled with chocolate buttons. As social science goes, this book ranks low. If you're looking for a genuine discussion of American education, try Diane Ravitch's _Left Back_.

I like Chomsky, but this book is a swindle:
I should say that I'm a fan of Chomsky's logical approach to political and historical criticism, but I'm afraid the title of this book is misleading. The book claims to be Noam Chomsky's view of education, but only 21 pages (out of 188) focus on Chomsky's ideas regarding education, and even that portion is merely a transcript of an interview in which Chomsky talks for about 16 pages. The rest of the book gives a basic overview of Chomsky's ideas on propaganda. That would be fine if the book was called 'Chomsky on Propaganda, with some notes on Mis-Education', but it isn't. At a list price of over twenty dollars, I find this book to be overpriced. Chomsky's books are never cheap (and are often beyond the budget of many who might find Chomsky's ideas interesting), but this one is far too expensive considering what the title led me to believe it was.