Noam Chomsky Defines What It Means to Be a Truly Educated Person

Noam Chomsky Defines What It Means to Be a Truly Educated Person | Open Culture

Chomsky, whose thoughts on education we’ve featured before, tells us in the short video interview at the top of the post how hedefines what it means to be truly educated. And to do so, he reaches  back to a philosopher whose views you won’t hear referenced often, Wilhelm von Humboldt, German humanist, friend of Goethe and Schiller, and “founder of the modern higher education system.” 

Humboldt, Chomsky  says, “argued, I think, very plausibly, that the core principle and requirement of a fulfilled human being is the ability to inquire and  create constructively, independently, without external controls.” A true education, Chomsky suggests, opens a door to human intellectual freedom and creative autonomy.

To clarify, Chomsky paraphrases a “leading physicist” and former MIT colleague, who would tell his students, “it’s not important what we cover in the class; it’s important what you discover.” On this point of view, to be truly educated means to be resourceful, to be able to “formulate serious questions” and “question standard doctrine, if that’s appropriate”…. It means to “find your own way.” This definition sounds similar to Nietzsche’s views on the subject, though Nietzsche had little hope in very many people attaining a true education. Chomsky, as you might expect, proceeds in a much more democratic spirit.