Chomsky, Noam. (2000). Chomsky on MisEducation, (Edited and introduced by Donaldo Macedo). Reviewed by Michael W. Apple, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Chomsky, Noam. (2000). Chomsky on MisEducation, (Edited and introduced by Donaldo Macedo). New York: Rowan and Littlefield. 208 pp. $19.95          ISBN: 0742501299 Reviewed by Michael W. Apple, University of Wisconsin, Madison March 9, 2001         Education is too often thought of as simply the delivery of neutral knowledge to students. In this discourse, the fundamental role of schooling is to fill students with the knowledge that is necessary to compete nationally and internationally in today's rapidly changing world. To this is often added an additional caveat: Do it as cost-effectively and as efficiently as possible. The ultimate arbiter of whether we have been successful at this is students' mean gains on achievement tests. A neutral curriculum is linked to a neutral system of accountability which in turn is linked to a system of school finance. Supposedly, when it works well, these linkages guarantee rewards for merit. "Good" students will learn "good" knowledge and will get "good" jobs.         This construction of good schooling, good management, and good results suffers from more than a few defects. Its foundational claims about neutral knowledge are simply wrong. If we have learned anything from the intense and continuing conflicts over what and whose knowledge should be declared "official" that have raged throughout the history of the curriculum in so many nations, it should have been one lesson. There is an intricate set of connections between knowledge and power. (Note 1) Questions of whose knowledge, who chooses, how this is justified–these are constitutive issues, not "add-ons" that have the status of afterthoughts. This construction of good education not only marginalizes the politics of knowledge, but it offers little agency to students, teachers, and community members. In some ways, it represents what Ball has characterized as "the curriculum of the dead." (Note 2)         Further, it is unfortunate but true that most of our existing models of education tend to ratify or at least not actively interrupt many of the inequalities that so deeply characterize this society. Much of this has to do with the relations between schooling and the economy, with gender, class, and race divisions in the larger society, with the intricate politics of popular culture, and with the ways we finance and support (or don't) education. (Note 3) The connections between schooling and good jobs are weakened even more when we closely examine what the paid labor market actually looks like. Rosy statistics of stock market gains and wealth creation cover the fact that in the really existing economy, all too many jobs require low levels of skills and low levels of formal education. There is a decided mismatch between the promises of schooling and actual job creation in our supposedly glorious free market economy, a mismatch that is distinctly related to the exacerbation of race, gender, and class divisions in this society. (Note 4)         Of course, there are those who see a much different connection between the market and education, one that is much more positive. For them, markets may offer hope for children, but even more so for the entrepreneurs who invest in marketized schooling. In their minds, the $700 billion education sector in the United States is ripe for transformation. It is seen as the "next health care"—that is, as a sphere that can be mined for huge profits. The goal is to transform large portions of publicly controlled non-profit educational institutions into a "consolidated, professionally managed, money-making set of businesses that include all levels of education." (Note 5) Even though comparatively little money is being made now, for-profit companies are establishing law schools, creating and/or managing elementary, middle, and secondary schools, engaging in education on factory floors and in businesses. Billions of dollars from corporations, investment funds, and even your pension funds (if you are lucky enough to have one) are pouring into for-profit educational ventures. In essence, in the words of Arthur Levine, the president of Teachers College at Columbia University, capital has said "You guys are in trouble and we're going to eat your lunch." (Note 6) For the private companies involved, their motives are clear. At the same time as they will eliminate the waste that putatively always comes from public schooling, they will turn education into "an efficiently run and profitable machine—using investors' money instead of tax dollars." (Note 7) Of course, this bears little resemblance to the experiences of those sitting in for- profit prison, of those living in cities whose economic base has been destroyed as owners and investors closed the factories there and moved them to non-unionized areas so that they wouldn't have to pay a liveable wage, or for decent schooling, health care, or pensions, or for those who live the "hidden" realities of this society. In Fine and Weis's words, we can best understand what this society, and its educational apparatus, is really like if we focus on those identifiable people who live in the "unknown city." (Note 8) This, of course, raises the issue of why certain things are known and others are indeed unknown. This differential visibility of information in this society—and the structures that underpin it—is not an accident.         While there may occasionally be problems with the traditional categories of "left" and "right" in sorting through the complexities of politics on the ground in all of our nations, many of us, including Chomsky and Macedo in the book under review here, self-consciously and without apology position themselves on the left. In their minds, and in my own, the United States remains a vast experiment, one in which both right and left argue about what it is an experiment in. The debate over this is vital and undoubtedly will continue. Indeed, it is part of the political lifeblood of the nation. However, like Richard Rorty, Chomsky and Macedo also believe that it is the left which keeps it going. In Rorty's words, For the Right never thinks that anything much needs to be changed: it thinks the country is basically in good shape, and may well have been in better shape in the past. It sees the Left's struggle for social justice as mere trouble making, as utopian foolishness. [Yet] the Left, by definition is the party of hope. It insists that our nation remains unachieved. (Note 9)         Rorty is insightful about the role of the progressive criticism in keeping this nation moving. After all, almost all of the social programs that many of us now take as "natural"—social security, for example—came about because of progressive mobilizations against the denial of basic human rights. However, Rorty is on less secure grounds when he claims that "the Right never thinks anything much needs to be changed," for a good deal of the right is very much involved in radical transformations. Over the past 2-3 decades, the right has mounted a concerted attack on what many of us took as natural. The entire public sphere has been brought into question. While these attacks on public institutions are broader than education, educational and cultural institutions such as the media have been centrally located in rightist criticisms. For this very reason, Chomsky on MisEducation is a helpful addition to the literature on critical cultural and educational analysis.         My reason for saying this is grounded in a particular political claim. Not only are rightist social movements exceptionally powerful now, but one of the most important elements of learning how to interrupt them is to understand what they did and do. Rightist movements have engaged in a vast social and ideological project. Examining how this has worked and why it has been successful can tell those of us who oppose it how it might best be countered. In my mind, if you want to interrupt dominance, it is absolutely crucial to study what it did and does. (Note 10) Few people have been as active in the attempt to interrupt dominance as Noam Chomsky.         For a considerable number of years, Noam Chomsky has played a crucial role in the intellectual and political life of the nation. In essence, he has been one of those people who acts as the conscience that this country has all too often lost. In doing this he is following what Eric Hobsbawm described as the historian's and social critic's duty. For Hobsbawm, the task is to be the "remembrancers of what [our] fellow citizens wish to forget." (Note 11) Such a role entails a commitment to detail the absent presences, the there that is not there, in dominant policies. Chomsky has performed this task with relish, offering powerful critiques of the ways in which dominance works in the economy, in the state, in international affairs, and in the media and education. His question has been simple but consistent: How do official interpretations of events, official language, and official knowledge work to legitimate certain interpretations of the power relations surrounding us, while marginalizing others?         What sets Chomsky apart from many other social critics is not one thing. Rather there is an interrelated set of elements that characterizes his work. Among the most important is his attention to historical detail. He marshals fact after fact against official interpretations of events until the edifice cracks under the weight of its own perfidy. Further, he is a master at seeing relationships among events that are often hidden beneath official rhetoric. Just as important is the fact that he writes exceptionally clearly. He is impatient with the equivocations of the obfuscatory language that dominates a good deal of academic writing on power, preferring instead to speak plainly and often (and deservedly) angrily about "really existing" power in this and other countries. Obviously, then, he is not one to doubt the existence of "facts" or "truth" and in fact this often constitutes his method. He accumulates data and then adds more. Perhaps I'm a closet positivist (although I doubt it), but I must admit this is refreshing, since all too often we have given over the empirical terrain to the Right, a terrain which they have predictably and aggressively filled.         I should say that there are some dangers in doing this. The postmodern critiques of "truth" may be overstated and may be couched at times in language that borders on arrogance. But they are not necessarily wrong. The rejection of such critiques—if it is done well—can remind us that "fact talk" is still a powerful way of mobilizing support for counter-hegemonic policies in education and the larger society. It also can show how some advocates of postmodernisms in education want it both ways. They constantly rely on certain accepted "truths" (the "realities" of poverty and racism, the impoverishment of millions of people as the global forces of neo-liberalism restructure economies internationally, for example); and yet they then turn around and argue against the existence of "truth." This is but a sleight of hand. But most political and intellectual traditions engage in it. It's a bit more glaring in some postmodernisms since their positions often depend on the rejection of such things. Chomsky's "rejection of their rejection" provides much food for thought.         Chomsky's own use of the accumulation of facts can be powerful. But at times he sacrifices complexity for the sake of clarity. He can occasionally sound rather too conspiracy oriented. However, let me immediately add that any possible loss here is more than compensated for by the power of his voice. One doesn't have to see conspiracies everywhere to recognize that differential power does exist (often is quite murderous ways), that the world of public information is tilted in favor of those in dominance, and that there are close connections between knowledge and power. This is especially the case now, when we are witnessing a resurgence of what I have elsewhere called "conservative modernization," an aggressive attempt to restructure our economic, political, and cultural/educational institutions around the values and needs of a conservative alliance. (Note 12) Understanding the larger aims of the neo-liberal and neo-conservative movements currently engaged in such restructuring gives more power to Chomsky's general purpose. He engages in what has been called "speaking truth to power." It also provides a context in which to put this particular volume.         Chomsky on MisEducation is not a book on what is usually considered to be "education." It has only one chapter that deals in any formal way with schooling and this is largely about higher education. In fact, Donaldo Macedo's clearly written and passionate introduction to the book has more on education than Chomsky's own essays. Yet, education itself must not be reduced to schooling for a number of reasons. This leads us to focus only on formal institutional structures that are officially labeled as educational. But what about labor education, community programs, literacy work in various informal sites, etc.? Second, and perhaps even more crucially, such a view can cause us to de-emphasize the powerful educative (or for Chomsky mis-educative) role of the media in distributing accounts of the world that are not only often quite limited or wrong, but clearly favor those with economic and political power.         Reading his account of the ways in which the media reported on Nicaragua, for example, is among the very best analyses of how important parts of the media have been colonized and/or used to legitimate what were (and continue to be) internationally illegal and immoral acts by the United States government. It is a tribute to the way he writes that something that is now seen as simply of historical interest (as if it is over) slowly but surely grabs the reader, compelling her or him to use the historical account to ask serious questions about today's policies. The US Government's Columbia Plan comes immediately to mind. Many millions of dollars will go to the Columbian military to "fight drugs." We are constantly told that we will not get involved in the internal politics of Columbia. Yet, the Columbian military has very close ties to extreme rightist para-military groups whose response to political dissidence is to kill those who challenge the current balance of power there. The US population is constantly barraged with official pronouncements in the news that ignore such realities. The message is that the money is needed to eradicate drug production–by, for example, indiscriminate spraying that includes food crops that are needed for survival. If this sounds like the infamous saying that came out of Vietnam—"We had to burn the village down in order to save it"—it means that you have a good memory. It is exactly the loss of collective memory that so distresses Chomsky.         The ways in which the "news" is constructed may seem distant from the world of education. Yet, let me remind you that Channel One, the for-profit channel that delivers current news to students in schools–and delivers students as a captive audience to corporate sponsors–is now in approximately 40% of middle and secondary schools in the United States. As I show in Official Knowledge, what counts as the news—and even the visual codes, the camera shots, and the editing—serve to empower some groups and dis-empower others. (Note 13) Who these groups are is often lamentably predictable. Thus, even if you are a bit worried that Chomsky and Macedo construct the terrain of education in too wide a fashion, given the existence of things such as Channel One the educational logic of taking the official construction of events seriously–and rigorously deconstructing it–is compelling.         One of the most interesting parts of the book is the public debate between Chomsky and John Silber, the President of Boston University and an ardent neo-conservative. If ever there was a clear demonstration of how some of our more aggressive neo-conservative critics often use a style of "debate" that amounts to a battering ram and seem unwilling to confront counter-arguments in a serious manner, this is it. Of course, Silber is well known for this kind of behavior. But similar tendencies that include ad hominem arguments and an utter certainty in the absolute correctness of one's own position can be found in more specifically educationally related literature--for example, in Abigail Thernstrom's contribution to the debate over standards in a recent book on the topic. (Note 14)         There are some limitations in this book. I've already mentioned its possible slide into conspiracy theories. One can be a deeply politicized activist and scholar and still understand that the world of power is quite complex, with multiple centers of power and multiple dynamics at work in any situation. While I, for instance, have fought for years to maintain a focus on (an non-reductive analysis of) political economy and class dynamics, issues of race and gender—as well as other dynamics—are central to any analysis of global forces and government policies. (Note 15) We live in a gendered state and a raced state as well as a classed one. As I have been at pains to demonstrate in Educating the "Right" Way, even class forces and alliances themselves are extremely complex and cannot be reduced to a simple formula of dominant class and subordinate class. Chomsky and Macedo never quite go over the line into such reductive accounts, but they come rather too close to it at times.         These criticisms are minor compared with what Chomsky as a whole has to offer. Chomsky on MisEducation is a useful introduction to him, but it is better read in conjunction with Chomsky's other, and longer, works on the media and on international relations. (Note 16) If it whets your appetite for the larger and more detailed accounts in these other works, then it will have performed a valuable service. After all, how can we educate our students in the skills and dispositions of critical educational work if we ourselves are not equally critical of how and by whom our own understandings are constructed? NOTES I have demonstrated these connections in a number of places. See, for example, Michael W. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum, second edition (New York: Routledge, 1990) Michael W. Apple, Education and Power, second edition (New York: Routledge, 1995), Michael W. Apple, Teachers and Texts (New York: Routledge, 1988), and Michael W. Apple, Official Knowledge, second edition (New York: Routledge, 2000). See also, James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me (New York: The New Press, 1995). See Stephen Ball, Education Reform: A Critical and Post-Structural Approach (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994). An articulate and thoughtful analysis of these relations is Jean Anyon, Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997). See also, Grace Kao, Marta Tienda, and Barbara Schneider, "Race and Ethnic Variation in Academic Performance," in Aaron Pallas, ed. Research in Sociology of Education and Socialization, Volume 11 (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1996), pp.263-297. This is described in considerably more detail in Michael W. Apple, Cultural Politics and Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996), pp.68-90. Edward Wyatt, "Investors See Room for Profit in the Demand for Education," The New York Times, November 4, 1999, p.A-1. Ibid. Ibid. Michelle Fine and Lois Weis, The Unknown City (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). 9. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p.14. This was exactly what led me to write my most recent book. See Michael W. Apple, Educating the "Right" Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality. New York: Routledge, 2001. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Pantheon, 1994), p.3. Apple, Educating the "Right" Way: Apple, Official Knowledge. Abigail Thernstrom, "No Excuses," in Deborah Meier, Theodore Sizer, Linda Nathan, and Abigail Thernstrom, Will Standards Save Public Education? (Boston: Beacon press, 2000). See, for example, Michael W. Apple, Power, Meaning, and Identity (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). See, e.g., Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent : The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York : Pantheon Books, 1988). About the Reviewer Michael W. Apple John Bascom Professor of Curriculum & Instruction and       Educational Policy Studies University of Wisconsin-Madison 225 N. Mills Street Madison, Wisconsin 53706 Michael W. Apple is a former elementary and secondary school teacher and past president of a teachers union. He has worked with governments, dissident groups, unions, and educators in many countries to democratize educational research, policy, and practice. He has written extensively on the relationship between education and power.