Noam Chomsky on Education

Teaching ought to be inspiring students to discover on their own, to challenge if they don’t agree, to look for alternatives if they think there are better ones, to work through the great achievements of the past and try to master them on their own ‘cause they’re interested in them. If that’s the way teaching is done, the students will really gain from it and will not only remember what they study, but will be able to use it as a basis for going on on their own. And again, education is really aimed at just helping students get to the point where they can learn on their own because that’s what you’re going to do for your life, not just absorb materials given to you from the outside and repeat it.

from an interview presented at the Learning Without Frontiers Conference, Jan. 25, 2012, London