Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationstrary, to shatter this education has to help youth to speak out, he hasto light the path their unconscious resistance has hitherto taken withthe radiance of concepts and transform it to a conscious and loudlyvocal awareness. But how can he achieve so strange a goal?Above all by destroying a superstition: the belief in the necessity ofthis educational operation. The usual view is that our present highlydisagreeable reality is the only one in any way possible. Examinewith this in mind the literature of our higher school and educationalsystem over the past decades: one will see with angry astonishmentthat, all the varying proposals and vehement contentions notwithstanding,the actual objective of education is everywherethought of as being the same; that the outcome of education hitherto,the production of the 'educated man' as he is at present understood,is unhesitatingly assumed to be the necessary and rational foundationof all future education. The uniform canon is that the youngman has to start with a knowledge of culture, not even with aknowledge of life and even less with life and experience itself. Andthis knowledge of culture is instilled into the,¥outh in the form of historicalknowledge; that is to say, his head is crammed with a tremendousnumber of ideas derived from a highly indirect knowledge ofpast ages and peoples, not from direct observation oflife. His desireto experience something himself and to feel evolving within him acoherent living complex of experiences of his own such a desire isconfused and as it were made drunk by the illusory promise that it ispossible to sum up in oneself the highest and most noteworthyexperiences offormer ages, and precisely the greatest offormer ages,in a few years. It is exactly the same crazy method as that which leadsour young painters into picture-galleries instead of into theworkshop of a master and before all into the unique workshop of theunique master, nature. As though one could appropriate the artsand sciences of past times, the actual yield of their life's experience,by taking a fleeting stroll through the gallery of history! As thoughlife itself were not a craft which must be learned from the ground upand practised remorselessly if it is not to eventuate in mere babblersand bunglers! -Plato considered it necessary that the first generation of his newsociety (in the perfect state) should be educated with the aid of amighty necessary lie: the children were to be taught to believe that theyhad all formerly dwelt asleep under the earth, where they had beenkneaded into shape by nature's workman. Impossible to rebel118