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Elementary School: Exploration and Creation
Chomsky began his formal education at a remarkably young age. Just prior to his second birthday, he was sent to a Deweyite experimental institution in Philadelphia called the Oak Lane Country Day School, where he remained until the age of twelve. This school was run by Temple University. John Dewey's progressive thinking about education is similar to that of the philosopher Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt, who was an important early precursor to Chomsky in both linguistic and political work. For Dewey, as for von Humboldt, "education . . . 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" (Chomsky, Chomsky Reader 149). Chomsky continues to support this position be cause he feels that individuals develop best when given the opportunity to create freely and to explore rather than follow rigid pedagogical principles. At Oak Lane he was able, with other children of various backgrounds and possessing different levels of talent, to expand his creative faculties without being intimidated by a competitive evaluation system. Chomsky recalls that students pursued their interests either individually or in groups, and that each member of the class was encouraged to think of himself or herself as a very successful student. Since the standard of comparison at Oak Lane was creativity rather than grades, no activity was ever considered more important than another, and the notion of "healthy competition," often promoted elsewhere as a sign of rigor, was derided. "[A]t least as a child, that was the sense that one had that, if competing at all, you were competing with yourself. What can I do? But no sense of strain about it and certainly no sense of relative ranking. Very different from what I notice with my own children, who as far back as the second grade knew who was `smart' and who was `dumb,' and who was high-tracked, and who was low-tracked. This was a big issue" (Chomsky Reader 5). At this point, it is already possible to recognize certain truisms that tend to recur in Chomsky's lectures, discussions, and publications. What was and is important to him about the family is its diversity, not its single-mindedness, and what marked him as a child were his memories of free and unstructured exploration rather than imposed curricula. Inspired by his parents and by his own experience in school, Chomsky tries, in his own teaching, to act as a stimulator, to coax the latent enthusiasm and potential of each student into the light of day. The problem of teaching, he feels, is not that students lack motivation, but rather that their motivation is crushed by the oppressive pedagogic structures that exist at all levels of the education system. This concern hasn't changed over the years; as Chomsky has achieved international recognition it has continued to inform both his political and his linguistic writings.
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