Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Schopenhauer as educatorsolidity that one cannot prophesy an eternity even for its conceptionof culture. One has even to consider it probable that the next thousandyears will hit on a couple of new ideas which might make thehair of our contemporaries stand on end. The belief in a metaphysicalsignificance of culture would in the end not be as alarming as all that:but perhaps some of the inferences one might draw from it in respectof education and schooling might be.It demands, to be sure, a quite exceptional reflective capacity to beable to see beyond the educational institutions of the present tothose altogether strange and different institutions which mayperhaps be required only two or three generations hence. For whilethe efforts of our present-day higher educators serve to produceeither the scholar or the civil servant or the money-maker or thecultural philistine or, finally and more usually, a compound of themall, those institutions still to be invented would have a more difficulttask - though not one more difficult as such, since it would be in anyevent a more natural and to that extent also easier task; and can anythingbe more difficult than, for example, to train a young man to bea scholar, a thing contrary to nature by the methods at presentemployed? The difficulty, however, lies for mankind in relearningand envisaging a new goal; and it will cost an unspeakable amount ofeffort to exchange the fundamental idea behind our present systemof education, which has its roots in the Middle Ages and the ideal ofwhich is actually the production of the medieval scholar, for a newfundamental idea. It is already time we took a clear view of theseantitheses, for some generation has to commence the struggle ifanother is to win it. The individual who has grasped this new fundamentalidea of culture already finds himself at the crossroads; ifhetakes one path he will be welcome to his own age, it will not fail tooffer him laurels and rewards, powerful parties will bear him along,behind him there will be as many likeminded men as there will bebefore him, and when the man in the front line gives the word ofcommand it will re-echo through all the ranks. Here the first duty is'to fight in rank and file', the second to treat as enemies all whorefuse to fall in. The other path will offer him companions moreseldom, it will be more difficult, more tortuous, steeper; those whohave taken the first path will mock at him because his path is morewearisome and more often dangerous, and will try to entice himover to themselves. If the two paths happen to cross he will be mishandled,thrown aside or isolated by being cautiously walkedaround. Now, what does a cultural institution mean to these dis-175