Nietzsche and Schooling

Synonyms

Education; Instruction; Pedagogy; Teaching; Training

Introduction

Friedrich Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human contains a striking statement about education: “The school has no more important task than to teach rigorous thinking, cautious judgment and consistent reasoning” (Nietzsche 1986, p. 125). Can this be Nietzsche that most radical and iconoclastic of thinkers, one wonders? Yes, it is. At any rate, it is the Nietzsche of 1878, the year that begins what commentators call the “middle” period of his published work. Whether it is the Nietzsche of poststructuralist citation and interpretation is another matter. The passage points toward a tension between two aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking relevant to education, that is, between a radical vision of personal development and chosen means that seem to imply a far more conservative agenda. The following discussion locates this problem within a broader context, not in order to eliminate the tension but rather to show that, for...