What Can Nietzsche Teach Us About Education? A Philosophical Challenge Worth Considering

What Can Nietzsche Teach Us About Education?

—A Hard Look In Both Directions—

By Philip L. Smith

The Ohio State University

Presented at the American Philosophical Association

Chicago, Illinois, February 2010

Academic philosophers in the United States have, for better or worse, generally ignored Nietzsche's work. His approach doesn't fit neatly into their analytic mode of inquiry, and they tend to view language as a tool existing apart from those who use it. Philosophers of education have had an additional reason to look away: Nietzsche takes a hammer to the very idea of institutionalized learning that education relies upon.

More importantly, he is especially critical of modern socialized democracy—the cultural foundation upon which our educational institutions are built. While there can be no doubt that Nietzsche aspired to move beyond any form of foundational authority, one can only imagine the harsh words he might have for what Richard Rorty happily referred to as "postmodern bourgeois liberalism."

H.L. Mencken, the preeminent American journalist who read all of Nietzsche's work in the original German and published the first English-language book on Nietzsche's philosophy in 1908, summarized his ideas as follows:

1. The ever-dominant impulse in all living beings, including humans, is the will to remain alive—the will to attain power over those forces which make life difficult or impossible.

2. All schemes of morality are nothing more than efforts to codify the expedients found useful by a given society in its successful endeavors to survive.

3. Despite the universal tendency to give these codes authority by crediting them to some god, they are essentially human-made and mutable—and should change as the conditions of human existence change.

4. The human race should endeavor to make its mastery over its environment more certain, widening the gap that separates it from other species.

5. Any code of morality which retains permanence after the conditions that gave rise to it have changed works against humanity's upward progress.

6. All gods and religions, because they protect moral codes against change, are inimical to the well-being of healthy and efficient people.

7. All ideas growing from such religions—such as humility, self-sacrifice, and brotherhood—are enemies of life as well.

8. Human beings of the ruling, efficient class should reject all gods and religions, along with the morality underlying them, and restore the primal instinct that enables individuals to differentiate between what benefits them and what harms them.

Nietzsche focused on religion and Christianity for a reason: they represented authority in its highest moral form. But his true target was any authority with a source outside the self, especially when it migrates into superficial ego-consciousness.

While Nietzsche never directly addressed American educational institutions, Mencken certainly did. Armed with his understanding and sympathy for Nietzsche's ideas, Mencken laid waste to the schools of his day. Writing in the Baltimore Sun in June 1927, he described those graduating from "the massed colleges..."