Carol Chomsky, the wife of world-renowned activist/author Noam Chomsky, has passed away. Carol was also a bright intellectual who taught and wrote important pieces on children and language development. Carol and Noam actually met when they were 5. Let's send our words of support to Noam, who has written such important, valuable works of scholarship.
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=2233Brilliant and accomplished, Carol Chomsky taught for many years at Harvard's Graduate School of Education and wrote oft-cited articles about how young children learn to read. And yet, she possessed talents that didn't easily fit on a curriculum vitae.
"She was a pretty remarkable person," said Judith Chomsky of Philadelphia, who is married to the younger brother of Dr. Chomsky's husband, Noam. "She was very athletic, and, until she was ill, she was fishing and water skiing and doing things people wouldn't normally associate with her. She played the accordion. She could fix a car. She was mechanical. I mean, she was the one who fixed everything at the house."
Through her work in language development and psycholinguistics, Dr. Chomsky also helped young children learn the mechanics of reading, and by doing so gain greater social acceptance in their classrooms. Dr. Chomsky died of cancer yesterday at her Lexington home. She was 78.
"She was a very upbeat, happy kind of a person," said Sylvia Schatz of Burlington, who is Dr. Chomsky's sister-in-law. "She was also a very giving person, of herself and of her thoughts, of her ideas, of her suggestions. And she was very generous, both in material things and with her support and help in many ways."
Among Dr. Chomsky's duties was, at times, acting as a de facto gatekeeper for those seeking access to her husband, a linguistics professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose writings and political activism made him famous in ways neither of them could have imagined when they married in 1949.
<snip>
The Chomskys married in 1949, and she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor's degree in 1951. A couple of years later, they tried living on a kibbutz in Israel.
"When they were young and they were on the kibbutz, she wanted to drive a tractor or be a mechanic," Judith Chomsky said. "Now, the kibbutz wasn't quite ready for that. It was way before there were even words about women's rights."
For various reasons, the Chomskys decided not to stay. They ended up in the Boston area, where he joined the faculty of MIT and they raised their three children.
As Noam Chomsky's political activism raised the possibility that he could end up spending time in jail, he and Dr. Chomsky made a decision that set the course of her professional life. Carol Chomsky went back to school and received a doctorate from Harvard, writing a dissertation on early childhood language acquisition.
<snip>
Funeral plans were not immediately announced
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2008/12/20/carol_chomsky_at_78_harvard_language_professor_was_wife_of_mit_linguist/
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