-
Period: to
Life and Education
Avram Noam Chomsky attended a Montessori type education, where as a child he was encouraged to follow his own interests. During this time he came in contact with the working-class Jewish Intellectual community, which encouraged his desire to learn. These interactions also formed the foundation of his future political beliefs. Formal University education bored him, and he almost gave up academia, until encouraged otherwise by mentor Zellig Harris. Chomsky continued to study mathematics.... -
Period: to
Activism and Dissent
"States are not moral agents; people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions" [1]. Chomsky believed that members of a nation are obligated to be the conscience of the ruling body. He was monitored by the CIA during the Vietnam War for his anti-war stances and widely hated for his rebuke of America's invasive foreign policy [3]. So strong in his convictions, he even was lambasted in France as a Holocaust denier (as a Jew) because of his defense of someone's freedom of speech. -
No Blank Slate
His most notable contribution to science: In response to a colleagues paper on how humans learn language, Chomsky posited that the human mind is not a blank slate on which we write with our experience, but is an innate part of what makes us human. (Smith, 86-94). We do learn terms and phrases, but the communication using noun and verb is hard-wired into us. Communication isn't a part of our upbringing, but the same all over the planet. See video below.
Link text -
The War on the War on Terror
"There can't be a War on Terror. It's a Logical impossibility." (Chomsky via Smith). " The new millennium has begun with two monstrous crimes: the terrorist attacks of September 11, and the reaction to them, surely taking a far greater toll of innocent lives." (Chomsky via Smith). Chomsky's mind was in the same place that most were after 9/11. He was revulsed and horrified, followed by a period where he tried to understand why the events unfolded the way that he did. He published...
