[kj] CRASS commercialism!

[B. Oliver Sheppard]

B. Oliver Sheppard wrote:

"No one ever said he was a church mouse. He isn't one, thank god."





In fact, here's a recent piece about Chomsky, and this is why I love 
that 80 year old bastard. Like I said, he's no shrinking violet; he 
takes an opportunity he can to speak to others. Here, he basically 
conference-called a high school class, told them over speakerphone the 
scholl was pretty much training them to grow up to be tools:

http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=192670&src=5 
<http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=192670&src=5>

*Linguist gives students lesson in free thinking
Dundee-Crown talks politics with MIT professor*

By Emily Krone | Daily Herald Staff
Published: 5/17/2008 12:16 AM

In a second-floor classroom at a Carpentersville high
school, one of America's most renowned free-thinkers
warned about 40 assembled students that the American
public school system conspires to blunt their
creativity and engender their obedience.

Via speakerphone from his office at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, linguistics professor Noam
Chomsky told Dundee-Crown High School students that a
two-tiered educational system exists: While the elite
attend schools that promote critical, independent
thought, the masses attend schools that train students
to pass tests and follow orders.



The system evolved after the Industrial Revolution,
Chomsky said, when the ruling elite recognized the
need to transform independent artisans and farmers
into pliant factory workers.

Today as then, Chomsky said, the imperative is the
production of a docile work force that will perpetuate
the status quo.

Many public schools teach students that "the highest
aspiration is to be a nurse or a policeman," Chomsky
said. "It's indoctrination: That's my place in life.
That's the way the school system works."

But Chomsky's claim that schools don't promote
critical thought was undermined by the willingness of
Community Unit District 300 officials to facilitate a
dialogue with the radical provocateur for the second
time this school year.

Chomsky agreed to chat regularly with Dundee-Crown
students after Bruce Taylor, a social science teacher
at the high school, last year crashed his Boston
office and engaged him in a conversation.

"I guess it left an impression," Taylor said.

Chomsky's first phone discussion with Dundee-Crown
students earlier this year drew about 260 students,
teachers and community members, Taylor said.

The students who assembled after school Friday came of
their own volition, Taylor stressed. They approached
the speakerphone to pose questions they had prepared,
or thought up on the spot.

"It was fantastic," said junior Ryan Nanni, who asked
the question that touched off the discussion about the
American public school system.

"He has a whole outside perspective that's so
different than everything that students usually hear,"
Nanni said.

During the one-hour discussion, Chomsky expounded on a
range of topics, including the danger of unbridled
consumerism, the Pentagon Papers, the proposed
"gas-tax holiday," illegal enemy combatants and '60s
radicalism.

He asked students whether they would characterize, as
the U.S. government does, a 15-year-old who throws a
grenade at an invading American army as an illegal
enemy combatant.

And he suggested that the working definition of
terrorism, as defined by the U.S. government, would
make America the world's leading terrorist state.

The goal of the these informal discussions, Taylor
said, is to spark debate -- and thought -- rather than
to espouse a particular political view.

"The root of education is the need to be challenged,"
Taylor said. "The open forum of ideas is what we're
trying to stress."