Religion and education

THE QUESTION: In the ZNet Sustainer's Forum System Chomsky was asked (August 1999) whether he was "perturbed" by the Kansas Board of Education's decision to eliminate testing of natural selection on state exams [a decision since reversed]..

CHOMSKY: Very much. Also by the decision to eliminate the Big Bang -- that is, to get rid of fundamentals of physics as well as the fundamentals of biology from the basic curriculum. More generally, this is another long step in the project of redesigning the school curriculum in ways that will reduce the possibility that students will have the intellectual tools to escape the fundamentalist fanaticism that the designers of the new curriculum prefer. One should not be fooled by the rhetoric that is used to disguise what they are doing, e.g., the pretense that anyone is still allowed to do as they like. Technically true, but the pressures to conform will, of course, be substantial. And we can guess how much attention students and teachers will give to material that is placed under a cloud, and is excluded from the core curriculum and examinations.

This is, as intended, a serious blow to integrity and honesty. If it were taking place in Andorra, maybe one could just laugh, although that would be unfair to Andorrans. They deserve much better than the rule of superstitious hysterics and extreme authoritarians, who try to instill obedience to their Holy Texts and chosen Divinities -- and we should not fail to see that the terms are appropriate, if anything too kind. But when this is happening in the richest and by far the most powerful country in the world, with a huge capacity for destruction and harm, it's no laughing matter. And it's not just Kansas. This is just one part of a wave of astonishing irrationality and fanaticism; other states have introduced similar measures. Recall as well a simple fact about the economics of the textbook industry. Publishers want to have a mass market, furthermore undifferentiated. It's expensive to produce and market separate texts for different parts of the country. Accordingly, there is a tendency, sometimes very strong, to move to the lowest common denominator. If a text won't sell in Kansas for reasons X, Y, Z, then cut out the "offending material" for the whole country. The consequences are obvious, and doubtless just what are intended by the authoritarian extremists who seek to impose their religious doctrines on the population at large.

There have, for years, been comparative studies of religious fanaticism and factors that correlate with it. By and large, it tends to decline with increasing industrialization and education. The US, however, is off the chart, ranking near devastated peasant societies. About 1/2 the population believe the world was created a few thousand years ago: the justification for the belief is that that is what they were ordered to believe by authority figures to whom they were taught one must subordinate oneself. And on, and on. One can easily understand why great efforts should be made to keep the public at an extremely low cultural and intellectual level, subordinated to power and blind obedience to authority. But it is something that should elicit very great concern.

It's also worth noting the hypocrisy. The same newspaper stories showed pictures of the Ten Commandments posted on walls of classrooms (a version of them, at least). Apart from the obvious questions of establishing a particular choice of religious doctrine within the public school system, have a look at what children are to be taught to believe -- on the (admittedly weak) assumption that anyone is expected to take the words seriously. Thus the self-designated chief of the gods orders them not to worship any of the other gods before him: in this polytheistic system, he is top dog. They are told not to make "graven images" (which means statues, pictures, etc.) -- that is, they are taught that all the priests, ministers, teachers, and other authority figures are liars and hypocrites. There's more -- all familiar in the 17th and 18th century, now to be driven from the mind by the autocrats who hope to gain control of the cultural system and demolish the threat of independent thought and rational analysis and discussion.

No slight matter, in my opinion.