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Wednesday 5 July 2017

Noam Chomsky/talks at Google/working class education


Says Chomsky: "It is worth remembering that working class education was a very serious phenomenon. It goes way back. It goes back to the late 19th century here, early industrial revolution. If Irish blacksmiths could get enough money they would hire a boy to read to them - while he`s working. And reading meant what we now call classics: modern contemporary literature."

"There were young women from the farms called factory girls who were kind of compelled to get into the textile factories in eastern New England and they had their own publications. You read them, they bitterly condemn the fact that the industrial system was depriving them of their culture; of their dignity; their independence. You`re selling yourself, not what you produce. You know it`s quite different. "

"And part of it was an attack on the culture - same in England. And there was a massive study, an interesting study, by a guy named Jonathan Rose of the reading habits of the English working class and it turns out his own conclusion is that they were better educated than the aristocrats.... They may not have gone to school and certainly didn`t go to Oxford but ... the rising working class had its own institutions of education and culture which was significant. A lot of that has been destroyed."

"In all kinds of ways Google doesn`t help..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C-zWrhFqpM


See The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

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