Chomsky on Anarchism.pdf - Zine Library

LRNGUAGE AND FREEDOM
other faculties, is generally achieved by his own activity, his own ingenuity, or
his own methods of using the discoveries of others .... " Education, then, must
provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and
challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way. Even a
language cannot, strictly speaking, be taught, bm only "awakened in the mind:
one can only provide the thread along which it will develop of itself." I think
that Humboldt would have found congenial much of Dewey's thinking about
education. And he might also have appreciated the recent revolutionary extension
of such ideas, for example, by the radical Catholics of Latin America who
are concerned with the "awakening of consciousness," referring to "the transformation
of the passive exploited lower classes into conscious and critical masters
of their own destinies" 11 much in the manner of Third World revolutionaries
elsewhere. He would, I am sure, have approved of their cricicism of
schools that are
more preoccupied with the transmission of knowledge than with
the creation, among other values, of a critical spirit. From the
social point of view, the educational systems are oriented to
maintaining the existing social and economic structures instead
of transforming them. 12