Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

at this point the left is basically offering nothing in the way of alternatives. What it ought to be getting across is the message, “Look, this is not the full range of alternatives, there are others”—and then it should present the others. And the others are not utopian. I mean, just look at the history of inner-city schools in the United States: there was a period, not so far back, when many of the inner-city schools here were extremely good—in fact, some of the black inner-city schools in Washington had among the highest college-acceptance rates in the country.29 Or take my own family, for example: they were immigrants from Eastern Europe—not peasants, but from a very poor Eastern European background—and they went through ordinary city schools in New York, some of them went to the City College, and they got very good educations. In fact, the City College of New York used to be one of the best schools in the country: public city school, no reason why it shouldn’t be. So good public education can certainly be achieved—but of course, like everything else, it’s going to depend on the general social and economic structure in which it operates. I mean, it’s true that things like violence and rotten schools are destroying the cities—but they’re destroying them because of a social structure that we’ve just got to change, from the bottom up. And yes, until people can see some hope of changing it, they’re going to pick from within the rotten set of options that are being presented...