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"THE FATHER OF MODERN LINGUISTICS"
Chomsky, born into a middle-class Jewish family, Chomsky attended an experimental elementary school in which he was encouraged to develop his own interests and talents through self-directed learning. When he was 10 years old, he wrote an editorial for his school newspaper lamenting the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Europe. His research then and during the next few years was thorough enough to serve decades later as the basis of “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” (1969), Chomsky’s critical review of a study of the period by the historian Gabriel Jackson.When he was 13 years old, Chomsky began taking trips by himself to New York City, where he found books for his voracious reading habit and made contact with a thriving working-class Jewish intellectual community. Discussion enriched and confirmed the beliefs that would underlie his political views throughout his life: that all people are capable of comprehending political and economic issues and making their own decisions on that basis; that all people need and derive satisfaction from acting freely and creatively and from associating with others; and that authority—whether political, economic, or religious—that cannot meet a strong test of rational justification is illegitimate. According to Chomsky’s anarchosyndicalism, or libertarian socialism, the best form of political organization is one in which all people have a maximal opportunity to engage in cooperative activity with others and to take part in all decisions of the community that affect them.
In 1945, at the age of 16, Chomsky entered the University of Pennsylvania but found little to interest him. After two years he considered leaving the university to pursue his political interests, perhaps by living on a kibbutz. He changed his mind, however, after meeting the linguist Zellig S. Harris, one of the American founders of structural linguistics, whose political convictions were similar to Chomsky’s. Chomsky took graduate courses with Harris and, at Harris’s recommendation, studied philosophy with Nelson Goodman and Nathan Salmon and mathematics with Nathan Fine, who was then teaching at Harvard University. In his 1951 master’s thesis, The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew, and especially in The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT), written while he was a junior fellow at Harvard (1951–55) and published in part in 1975, Chomsky adopted aspects of Harris’s approach to the study of language and of Goodman’s views on formal systems and the philosophy of science and transformed them into something novel.Chomsky received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955 after submitting one chapter of LSLT as a doctoral dissertation (Transformational Analysis). In 1956 he was appointed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to a teaching position that required him to spend half his time on a machine translation project, though he was openly skeptical of its prospects for success (he told the director of the translation laboratory that the project was of “no intellectual interest and was also pointless”). Impressed with his book Syntactic Structures (1957), a revised version of a series of lectures he gave to MIT undergraduates, the university asked Chomsky and his colleague Morris Halle to establish a new graduate program in linguistics, which soon attracted several outstanding scholars, including Robert Lees, Jerry Fodor, Jerold Katz, and Paul Postal.
In short, He attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied linguistics under the guidance of Zellig Harris, a leading figure in the field. Chomsky’s undergraduate thesis, "Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew," laid the groundwork for his future contributions to linguistics. His time at the University of Pennsylvania culminated in a Ph.D. in linguistics in 1955.
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