Why do we educate

Chomsky’s contrast between discovery-driven education and compliance-driven schooling lands even harder in 2025, when AI tutors grade essays in seconds and national ranking tables turn curiosity into a KPI. His insistence that technology remains “a neutral hammer” feels prescient: generative models can craft Nobel-worthy prose or deep-fake propaganda, depending entirely on the critical-thinking muscles we build in the classroom.

From an Intelligence Amplifier (IA) —the talk is a call to integrate AI as a sparring partner, not a script writer. When students prompt ChatGPT, the real learning happens in questioning its output, iterating hypotheses, and challenging the model—mirroring Chomsky’s framework-guided inquiry. Assessment, therefore, should measure the quality of questions posed and the originality of follow-up exploration, not just factual regurgitation.

Why do we educate? Is it to inflate GDP charts, to out-rank neighboring districts, or to nurture the next Mozart of machine learning? In a 2012 keynote that feels tailor-made for the AI era, linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky dismantles the idea that schooling’s highest calling is job-training. Instead, he restores the Enlightenment vision of education as a launchpad for lifelong inquiry.

1. Two Competing Visions

Chomsky draws a sharp line between an Enlightenment model—where learning sparks independent thought—and an indoctrination model that prizes obedience over originality. The latter, he notes, resurged after the 1960s, when policymakers lamented that “society was becoming too democratic.” Test batteries, rising tuition debt and narrowly vocational curricula were the tools of containment. (YTScribe)

2. Technology: Tool or Trap?

The Internet, like a hammer, “doesn’t care whether you build a house or crush a skull.” AI language models magnify this neutrality. Without a guiding mental framework, students drown in factoids or fall down algorithmic rabbit holes. With it, they wield the world’s knowledge as scaffolding for new ideas. (YTScribe, WIRED)

3. The Litmus Test of Learning

True education, argues Chomsky, is measured not by memorized content but by what students do when no syllabus is handed to them. If a sixth-grader is forced to abandon a newfound passion to cram for standardized tests, the system has failed. Contrast that with a lab where undergraduates are encouraged to question a Nobel laureate; the latter breeds discovery and, paradoxically, the innovations that power modern economies. (YTScribe)

4. Education as Intelligence Amplification

In the emerging IA paradigm, AI tools extend human cognition—but only if learners steer the conversation. Chomsky’s framework supplies the moral compass: encourage doubt, protect the right to dissent, and prioritize imaginative collaboration over rote answers. The payoff isn’t just smarter workers; it’s freer citizens capable of shaping technology rather than being shaped by it.

Conclusion

Chomsky leaves us with a challenge: build classrooms—and boardrooms—where curiosity outranks compliance. Do that, and the next wave of technology will amplify our most human capacities instead of replacing them.