Furthermore On Education
The college football season begins. Following an afternoon of immersion in drag racing at Great Lakes Drag-a-way in Wisconsin, I resigned myself to indifferently watching the game between Texas A&M and Notre Dame on channel 7. The commentators ballyhoo’d the start of the season, which features televised games in state-of-the-art stadiums viewed by millions, when you include the television audiences. What does any of this have to do with education is the question that persists in my mind. The young men on the field, are they students? Or are they gladiators on a farm team in the manifestly violent institution of American football? I think that I know the answer…
The answer, – a further manifestation of the point of a rumination offered by Nietzsche in this passage from Beyond Good and Evil published in 1883. A university professor appealing to the student to be him/herself sounds quite noble and commendable. Nietzsche suggests this is quite the opposite from what it seems. Nietzsche references the Roman Horace’s letter* that when one attempts to drive out with a pitchfork what one naturally is, well then, nature always manages to return…
The head to head collisions on the playing field of American football, how does this not epitomize vulgarity?
*Epistle, I.10, 24 “Try with a pitchfork to drive out nature, she always returns.”
And what else
are education and culture for these days!
In our very popular,
which is to say vulgar age,
“education” and “culture” essentially have to be
the art of deception
– to deceive about lineage,
about the inherited vulgarity in body and soul.
An educator
who preaches truthfulness
above all else these days
and constantly calls for his students
to “be true! be natural! be what you are!”
– after a while,
even a virtuous and
trusting ass like this
will learn to reach for that furca of Horace,
in order to
naturam expellere: and with what success?
“The vulgar” usque recurret.
Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche, Trans. Judith Norman, aphorism 264
3 thoughts on “Furthermore On Education”
Interesting posits about education in juxtaposition with our inheritance from forebear’s. In my response below, perhaps I’m just in denial about my own experience and the impact of both nature and nurture on who I am at this point in life.
First, education is not just schooling, for we are offered the potential to learn on a daily basis, each lesson having the capacity to alter our perspective, to move us in a slightly different direction. Of course, in order to change, we must remain open to new ideas and allow ourselves to question the tenets of our lives so far. [Unfortunately, many people close themselves off to all new information.]
I agree that our genetic make-up and the environment where we grew up have a great deal to do with how we absorb information, but I also believe we can move past these barriers to find new paths and develop new ways of seeing the world, regardless of what we were born with. Unless I have misinterpreted Mr. Nietzsche’s words, I am disagreeing with his assessment regarding his perception of the futility of education.
Amen to all of your points.
As it stands Nietzsche is no longer available to draw a finer point to what he has written. His philosophy remains radical to our time and was even more so in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century.
I agree that education has potential to influence the course of one’s life. It is up to the learner I think. Perhaps that is simply the way it feels, as if one chooses to be open to grasp lessons which the psyche indicates are just for him or her… Or is the openness another feature of the outworking of genetics and conditioning that coincide such that the student is receptive? There are many with degrees from reputable institutions that appear to proceed without waver down the road they’ve always known. I’d say that “education” was a failure, a waste of resources.
I recognize that each has the ability do direct one’s solitary life to risk failure and greatness or to fulfill a desire for a safe mediocrity.
Yes indeed. Death seems to place a cap on one’s ability to respond to a critique. That in itself is a great frustration since many of us would love to be able to converse with, question, and potentially enlighten the great thinkers who have come before us. We can certainly learn from their words but the interaction of give and take leaves us to conjecture about “what if.”
I remember reading about the Vienna Circle in Janna Levin’s book, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines and what it might have been like to participate in some of those intense coffee house discussions. Despite that envy, I also know that we have people in the present with whom we can discuss ideas and musings. This blog is a shining example and though I don’t engage in any group (for whatever silly reason), I know that the individual interactions I have with members is extremely gratifying.
And so we continue to learn through the questioning of our friends, our world, and especially ourselves for however long we might have.