Number 2 in a sporadic series.

Pulled from The Twilight of the Idols (under Things the Germans Lack)…

Everything that matters has been lost sight of by the whole of the higher educational system of Germany: the end quite as much as the means to that end. People forget that education, the process of cultivation itself, is the end—and not “the Empire”—they forget that the educator is required for this end—and not the public-school teacher and university scholar. Educators are needed who are themselves educated, superior and noble intellects, who can prove that they are thus qualified, that they are ripe and mellow products of culture at every moment of their lives, in word and in gesture;—not the learned louts who, like “superior wet-nurses,” are now thrust upon the youth of the land by public schools and universities. With but rare exceptions, that which is lacking in Germany is the first prerequisite of education—that is to say, the educators; hence the decline of German culture. One of those rarest exceptions is my highly respected friend Jacob Burckhardt of Bâle: to him above all is Bâle indebted for its foremost position in human culture What the higher schools of Germany really do accomplish is this, they brutally train a vast crowd of young men, in the smallest amount of time possible, to become useful and exploitable servants of the state. “Higher education” and a vast crowd—these terms contradict each other from the start. All superior education can only concern the exception: a man must be privileged in order to have a right to such a great privilege. All great and beautiful things cannot be a common possession: pulchrum est paucorum hominum.—What is it that brings about the decline of German culture? The fact that “higher education” is no longer a special privilege—the democracy of a process of cultivation that has become “general,” common. Nor must it be forgotten that the privileges of the military profession by urging many too many to attend the higher schools, involve the downfall of the latter. In modern Germany nobody is at liberty to give his children a noble education: in regard to their teachers, their curricula, and their educational aims, our higher schools are one and all established upon a fundamentally doubtful mediocre basis. Everywhere, too, a hastiness which is unbecoming rules supreme; just as if something would be forfeited if the young man were not “finished” at the age of twenty-three, or did not know how to reply to the most essential question, “which calling to choose?”—The superior kind of man, if you please, does not like “callings,” precisely because he knows himself to be called. He has time, he takes time, he cannot possibly think of becoming “finished,”—in the matter of higher culture, a man of thirty years is a beginner, a child. Our overcrowded public-schools, our accumulation of foolishly manufactured public-school masters, are a scandal: maybe there are very serious motives for defending this state of affairs, as was shown quite recently by the professors of Heidelberg; but there can be no reasons for doing so.

Just a page or so from Nietzsche, and so much to unpack!  So much that could be written about our very circumstances today in an entirely different country!  And I’m starting with this because it will be less contentious than other criticisms of Western pretenses that he makes.

Nietzsche raises a point well understood by the ancient Greeks – that education for the elite is a different matter than the education of the masses.  The legacy of American Progressivism is to both support this (with the need to produce credentialed expertise for the administrative state) and deny it (via the the fiction of a college education being necessary for everyone, so that all may have the same above average income and opportunities associated with a college degree when it was not universal).  That contemporary conservatives conserve this old progressive fiction is testament to the vapidity of their creed.

More recently (as in circa the 70s-90s), Christopher Lasch addressed the same issue about elite education versus common education in both The Culture of Narcissism and The Revolt of the Elites.  And as he was a critic of the imported Prussian model of education, he shares some of the perspective of Nietzsche – not that he ever acknowledged it even if he recognized it.  Lasch points out the inevitable need to dilute what constitutes an elite education in order to make it accessible to a broader segment of the population.  This was traditionally done without really admitting the dilution was happening to maintain the facade of elite accessible to all.  If anything, the radicals of the 1960s/70s can be given some credit for challenging this, though of course we know with what results (the bureaucratization of their own fetishes).

One of the American problems is that we have never really been comfortable with elitism.  We utterly rejected Hamilton’s notion of a largely hereditary elite (which was much too English), and even Jefferson’s natural aristocracy was not a comfortable fit for our notions about equality.  To be elite as an American is to eschew the trappings of being elite and that isn’t easy to pull off.  In reading Siegfried Sassoon’s auto-biography-as-fiction, I couldn’t help but be struck at the strangeness of English class structure – at least from an American perspective.  This is also an area that is difficult in Nietzsche, as he is no romantic about the masses, nor is he quite the apologist for the elite (at least the elite as it existed), yet he will criticize slave-morality and praise master-morality.  That has a pretty clear bias to a social hierarchy, and not one that has many admirable instantiations.  We’ll get more into that in a later discussion.

The sad human reality is, just as with organization, social hierarchy is an unavoidable part of our nature.  We should be evolving away from our ancient roots, but we are oh so slow to do so.  We have now perfected in our educational system mediocrity as the highest value, both for the actual elite as well as the middle class.  Neither are served particularly well by this.

Now, I’ve presented Nietzsche as a critic, and he would reject that he was so limited as to being only a critic, and in fact in the ensuing paragraphs he has this to say:

In order to be true to my nature, which is affirmative and which concerns itself with contradictions and criticism only indirectly and with reluctance, let me state at once what the three objects are for which we need educators. People must learn to see; they must learn to think, and they must learn to speak and to write: the object of all three of these pursuits is a noble culture. To learn to see—to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts…

As to learning how to think—our schools no longer have any notion of such a thing. Even at the universities, among the actual scholars in philosophy, logic as a theory, as a practical pursuit, and as a business, is beginning to die out. Turn to any German book: you will not find the remotest trace of a realisation that there is such a thing as a technique, a plan of study, a will to mastery, in the matter of thinking,—that thinking insists upon being learnt, just as dancing insists upon being learnt, and that thinking insists upon being learnt as a form of dancing. What single German can still say he knows from experience that delicate shudder which light footfalls in matters intellectual cause to pervade his whole body and limbs! Stiff awkwardness in intellectual attitudes, and the clumsy fist in grasping—these things are so essentially German, that outside Germany they are absolutely confounded with the German spirit. The German has no fingers for delicate nuances. The fact that the people of Germany have actually tolerated their philosophers, more particularly that most deformed cripple of ideas that has ever existed—the great Kant, gives one no inadequate notion of their native elegance. For, truth to tell, dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education: dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen—that one must learn how to write?—But at this stage I should become utterly enigmatical to German readers.

I love this bit about learning to think as akin to learning to dance.  The attributes to doing so naturally exist, but must be cultivated and refined.  This is part of what makes Nietzsche intriguing to me.  In Zarathustra he repeatedly presents this ideal man as one who laughs and sings and dances, not frivolously, but because of how deeply human it is to do those things.  Just about as far from the sturm-und-drang Germanic thing as you can get.  And he is always a bit ambiguous as to how he relates to Germans, at times speaking in the present plural (i.e. “we Germans”) and equally at arms length as an outside observer.

Nietzsche is also a bit disingenuous there about his critical nature, as that is always his sharpest thought.  He preached the need for the transvaluation of all values, but that is a monumental, creative task and ultimately it was beyond his reach.  That does not diminish the insights from his criticisms.  That this one on education is as relevant to us today as it was in his own time proves that point.