NIETZSCHE AND EDUCATION

This entry is based on Nietzsche’s 1872 short course of lectures at Basel, also planned as the future book: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions (Über Die Zukunft Unserer Bildungsanstalten).

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For a dismayed observer of the modern American system of education employing the despicable method of “multiple choice,” it seems inconceivable that the ages-honored superior German method of education may ever find itself a target of criticism… Yet, of course, when the critic is none other than our dear good friend Nietzsche, this ought not to be surprising in the least, as with Nietzsche all things are possible.

Nietzsche’s little-known, yet eminently significant and quite instructive course of five lectures, preceded by an Introduction, plus a Preface to the entire published text, certainly deserves an extensive separate entry. I obviously intend to expand the present first approximation of it in the future, but at the present time this will have to suffice.

In the Introduction to the lecture course, the following paragraph capsulates its key element:

"Two seemingly antagonistic forces equally deleterious in their actions and ultimately combining to produce their results are at present ruling over our educational institutions although these were based originally upon very different principles. These forces are: a striving to achieve the greatest possible extension of education on the one hand, and a tendency to minimize and to weaken it on the other. The first-named would fain spread learning among the greatest possible number of people, the second of them would compel education to renounce its highest and most independent claims in order to subordinate itself to the service of the state. In the face of these two antagonistic tendencies, we could but give ourselves up to despair, did we not see the possibility of promoting the cause of two other contending factors which are fortunately as completely German as they are rich in promises for the future; I refer to the present movement towards limiting and concentrating education as the antithesis of the first of the above-mentioned forces, and that other movement towards the strengthening and the independence of education as the antithesis of the second force. If we should seek a warrant for our belief in the ultimate victory of the two last-named movements, we could find it in the fact that both of the forces which we hold to be deleterious are so opposed to the eternal purpose of nature as the concentration of education for the few is in harmony with it, and is true, whereas the first two forces could succeed only in founding a culture false to the root."

One of the central themes of the lecture course is the discussion of leaders and followers. Nietzsche sees the greatest problem of German students (the generalization is mine!) not in having too little, or too much freedom, but in the dearth of worthy leaders. In other words, students must have good leaders, they cannot do without good leaders, whose absence is unquestionably the greatest problem of all educational institutions.

"For that was the doom of those promising students: they did not find the leaders they wanted. They gradually became uncertain, discontented, and at variance among themselves; unlucky indiscretions showed only too soon that the one indispensability of powerful minds was lacking in the midst of them: they were leaderless…"

Now, here, at the end of the last fifth lecture comes the following striking conclusion.---

"…All culture begins with the very opposite of that which is now so highly esteemed as academic freedom: with obedience, with subordination, with discipline, with subjection. And as leaders must have followers so also must the followers have a leader—here a certain reciprocal predisposition prevails in the hierarchy of spirits: yea, a kind of pre-established harmony. This eternal hierarchy, towards which all things naturally tend, is always threatened by that pseudo-culture which now sits on the throne of the present. It endeavors either to bring the leaders down to the level of its own servitude, or to cast them out altogether. It seduces the followers when they are seeking their predestined leader, and overcomes them by the fumes of its narcotics. When, however, in spite of all this, leader and followers have at last met, wounded and sore, there is an impassioned feeling of rapture, like the echo of an ever-sounding lyre, a feeling that I can let you divine only by means of a simile.

…Have you ever, at a musical rehearsal, looked at the strange, shriveled-up, good-natured species of men who usually form the German orchestra? What changes and fluctuations we see in that capricious goddess form! What noses and ears, what clumsy, danse macabre movements! Just imagine for a moment that you were deaf, and had never dreamed of the existence of sound or music, and that you were looking upon the orchestra as a company of actors, and trying to enjoy their performance as a drama and nothing more. Undisturbed by the idealizing effect of the sound, you could never see enough of the stern, medieval, wood-cutting movement of this comical spectacle, this harmonious parody on the homo sapiens.

Now, on the other hand, assume that your musical sense has returned, and that your ears are opened. Look at the honest conductor at the head of the orchestra performing his duties in a dull, spiritless fashion: you no longer think of the comical aspect of the whole scene, you listen—but it seems to you that the spirit of tediousness spreads out from the honest conductor over all his companions. Now you see only torpidity and flabbiness, and you hear only the trivial, the rhythmically inaccurate, and the melodiously trite. You see the orchestra only as an indifferent, ill-humored, and even wearisome crowd of players.

…But set a genius—a real genius—in the midst of this crowd; and you instantly perceive something almost incredible. It is as if this genius, in his lightning transmigration, had entered into these mechanical, lifeless bodies, and as if only one demoniacal eye gleamed forth out of them all… Now look and listen—you can never listen enough! When you again observe the orchestra, now loftily storming, now fervently wailing, when you notice the quick tightening of every muscle and the rhythmical necessity of every gesture, then you too will feel what a pre-established harmony there is between leader and followers, and how in this hierarchy of spirits everything impels us towards the establishment of a like organization. You can divine from my simile what I would understand by a true educational institution, and why I am very far from recognizing one in the present type of university.

So here is an unforgettable Nietzsche of the educational Führerprinzip. I have no problem with him here. It is a point where the totalitarian principle suddenly transforms itself into the elitarian, and separating the two, necessarily artificially, just does not make any sense.