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When it comes to education in schools, some philosophers mortgage their worldviews. One such philosopher is Friedrich Nietzsche.1 Nietzsche sees in schooling a derivative activity that cannot sustain his radical views of the human self. He cannot, for example, imagine an education that would cultivate human beings who are truly "cultured."2 And he does not believe that mass education can foster democratic habits among most individuals.3 Nietzsche demarcates the goals of his own philosophical project from the goals of German education of late nineteenth century. What I am interested in is this line of demarcation. What can such a line tell us about either Nietzsche's theory of education, or about education in schools per se? Why did he in his early work disparage education in schools when he could instead have re-visioned all such education in Nietzschean terms? Questions like this, about Nietzsche's demarcation, beg for different sorts of answers than do other questions that typically get posed in educational theory. For example, a typical question might ask how the work of Nietzsche can be applied to education. But this would contradict his intent. Nietzsche does not think his philosophy fits into what universal education has to offer. Thus the untypical question: What is it in schooling that does not tolerate his philosophy?
In this essay I will look at Nietzsche's exclusion of schooling. I will ask why mass education does not gain purchase in his worldview; why institutional pedagogy is disparaged. Of course, I do not choose Nietzsche randomly. I choose him because Michel Foucault puts us on the scent of Nietzsche's reasoning. Taking a cue from Foucault, we learn that Nietzsche's rejection has much to do with the self reproductive capacities of education. Foucault has shown that educational institutions, since before Nietzsche's era, are places where the modern self is re-produced as a norm.4 Such institutional norming of selves must be seen against the backdrop of Foucault's time-removed mentor, Nietzsche, who advocates versions of subjectivity that do not fall within such a modern norm.
For Nietzsche, only radical versions of the human self will do, and it is this fact that is at the bottom of his condemnation of mass education. But while it is easier for Nietzsche to condemn education as...