THE PURPOSE OF ALL INSTRUCTION

Formerly titled The Purpose Of All Education, this entry focuses on the role of the teacher as a person, and of the student as a master learning from a master, and it centers around Nietzsche’s Preface to Vom Nutzen. He starts the Preface with a quotation from Goethe: “Moreover, I hate everything that merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity.” These are Goethe’s words from a letter to Schiller, with which we may begin our consideration of the worth and worthlessness of history. Our goal will be to show why instruction which fails to quicken activity, why knowledge which enfeebles activity, why history as a costly intellectual excess and luxury must in the spirit of Goethe’s words be seriously hated. Certainly we need history. But we need it for life and action, and not for the smug avoiding of them. Only in so far as history serves life will we serve it.

What Nietzsche says about history can be applied to all arts and sciences, or rather, to the instruction thereof. I have taken this principle close to heart in my own life, first learning it from my excellent tutors, and then applying it to my own instruction of others. In a number of introductions to student classes and audiences, I proposed to them that whatever specific subject a good student comes to learn from a good instructor, the only subject really taught and learned in such a class is the person of the instructor himself. It is the objective of the instructor, however, to make his own person interesting enough, and stimulating enough for the student to become interested in the subject presented by the instructor enough to “quicken the student’s activity” and to direct him or her toward learning the subject by himself and for himself, using the instructor’s help in his drive, but never substituting the instruction for the subject of study itself.

It is clear from this that my understanding of instruction is intimately close to Goethe’s and Nietzsche’s. It is just one instance when such a closeness of views is in evidence. It is beside the point to discuss to what extent my mentors’ views and mine were directly influenced by Goethe, Nietzsche, and other educators, or whether this has been an affinity of spirit. After all, the best of us do not allow ourselves to be influenced by notes which are not harmonious to the strings of our particular nature, and even with a single source of our inspiration, its influence on us is highly selective, in the sense that certain things ‘click’ with us, while others do not.