Noam Chomsky - On Being Truly Educated

My name is n chsky. I am a retired professor at the Master Institute of Technology, where I have been for 65 years. I don't think I can do any better to answer the question of what it means to be

truly

educated

than to return. to some of the classical views on the subject, for example the views expressed by the founder of the modern higher education system, Bam Fon Hol, a leading humanist figure of the Enlightenment who wrote extensively on education and human development and argued that I think it is very plausible that the central principle and requirement of a realized human

being

is U the ability to investigate and create uh constructively and independently without external controls uh pass on to a modern counterpart uh a prominent physicist U who taught here he used to tell us in classes that it's not important what we cover in class, it's important what you discover.

Not

being

truly

educated

from this point of view means being in a position to investigate and create based on the resources available to you that you have come to appreciate and understand uh knowing where to look knowing how to ask ask serious questions question Standard Doctrine if appropriate finding your own way of shaping the questions worth pursuing and developing the path to pursue them that means knowing how to understand many things, but also much more important than what you have in mind knowing where to look how to look how to question how to challenge how to proceed independently to deal with the challenges that the world presents to you and that you develop in the course of your self-education and uh uh inquiry and uh investigations and cooperation and solidarity with others that is what an educational system should cultivate from the garden from kindergarten to graduate high school and then at best sometimes it does and that leads to people who at least by my standards are well educated