Editing Noam Chomsky (section)

== Philadelphia Childhood ==

Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in Philadelphia, the first son of William Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, both immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father, a Hebrew scholar who taught at Gratz College, created an intellectually rigorous household where linguistic awareness came naturally. His mother's political activism—she was active in various leftist causes—contributed the political engagement that would characterize his adult work. The Philadelphia Jewish intellectual community in which he was raised combined scholarly seriousness with political awareness that his career would manifest.<ref name="smith">{{cite book |last=Smith |first=Neil |title=Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals |year=1999 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |location=Cambridge}}</ref>

His education at Oak Lane Country Day School and Central High School provided exposure to progressive pedagogy and rigorous academics respectively. His teenage years included visits to anarchist bookstores in New York and deepening engagement with political questions that the 1930s and 1940s made urgent. His undergraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied linguistics under Zellig Harris, began the academic career that would transform the field. Philadelphia's intellectual environment—its Hebrew scholarship, its leftist politics, its academic institutions—shaped the thinker he became.<ref name="barsky"/>

His doctoral work at Penn, completed in 1955, developed ideas that his MIT career would elaborate. The transformation of linguistics from behavioral description to cognitive science that his work initiated began in Philadelphia seminars and conversations. His departure for MIT in 1955 ended his Philadelphia residence but not the influence that his upbringing there had established. The combination of linguistic awareness and political engagement that characterized his Philadelphia childhood predicted the dual career that would follow.<ref name="smith"/>