March 3, 2014

education is an end in itself (1889)

[Education] has lost sight of the most important thing: the end as well as the means to the end. That schooling, education is an end in itself . . . that to this end educators are needed – and not grammar-school teachers or university scholars – people have forgotten this . . . What is needed is educators who have educated themselves: superior, noble minds, proven at every moment, proved by their words and silences, mature cultures grown sweetnot the learned louts whom grammar school and university set up to the youth of today as 'higher nurse-maids.' Apart from the rarest of exceptions, educators – the foremost precondition for education – are lacking . . . schools actually achieve a brutal kind of training aimed at losing as little time as possible in making a multitude of young men usable, exploitable for public service. . . . our 'high' schools are without exception geared to the most ambiguous mediocrity, with teachers, teaching plans, teaching objectives.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)