Chomsky greatly admired his uncle, a man of little formal education, but someone who was wildly smart about the world around him. Rather amazingly, his story was substantially researched enough to be the basis for a later essay he would present at New York University.īy the age of 13, Chomsky was traveling from Philadelphia to New York, spending much of his time listening to the disparate perspectives hashed out among adults over cigarettes and magazines at his uncle’s newsstand at the back of a 72nd Street subway exit. At the age of 10, while attending a progressive school that emphasized student self-actualization, Chomsky wrote an editorial on the rise of fascism in Europe after the Spanish Civil War for his school newspaper. His father, William, a Russian Jewish immigrant like his mother, was a respected professor of Hebrew at Gratz College, an institution for teacher’s training. His mother, Elsie, had been active in the radical politics of the 1930s. One of his earliest memories consisted of watching security officers beat women strikers outside of a textile plant.

He was raised with a younger brother, David, and although his own family was middle class, he witnessed injustices all around him. Born in Philadelphia on December 7, 1928, Chomsky felt the weight of America's Great Depression. Early Life and EducationĬhomsky was a brilliant child, and his curiosities and intellect were kindled greatly by his early experiences. Chomsky is widely published, both on topics in his field and on issues of dissent and U.S. Since 1955, he has been a professor at MIT and has produced groundbreaking, controversial theories on human linguistic capacity. Noam Chomsky was an intellectual prodigy who went on to earn a PhD in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Understanding power by noam chomsky