The ongoing viral pandemic has slowly driven home a self-evident truth that all human activity has evolved, and is centered, on an economic reality. When human activity in more than half the world shuts down, the repercussions are long in time and exacting when it comes to human costs. Under this all-pervading reality, questions like “What is education?” “What should one learn?” and, most importantly, “How should one learn?” become all the more important because education across the world is aimed at equipping oneself with “merely” a skill so that one can contribute to this economic reality. Our child and adolescent pursuits are dedicated to acquiring this one skill — sport is no exception. The more people with skills, the better, as they can contribute more to burgeoning trillion-dollar economies of states to become quadrillion-dollar economies. Isn’t it where all economies are headed?
A 2013 Harvard report on education (http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jamessimpson/files/mapping_the_future.pdf) states that for a discipline in an university to be successful, the discipline must be either (i) devoted to the study of money or (ii) capable of attracting serious research money; or (iii) demonstrably promise that
its graduates will make significant amounts of money. No wonder there is a clamor for engineering, technology, and business disciplines. However, how many of the students who complete degrees in these disciplines become economically successful is another question.
How does one think of education itself as flawed? Anti-education happens when one deeply thinks about education and analyzes the findings with intelligence and honesty. Anti-education emerges when one arrives at answers to the questions above. Anti-education becomes valuable when one views education as something beyond acquiring a skill to earn a living. Making a living is inescapable for which one needs a skill but is that the true and only purpose of education? What is the role of the family in educating children?
Nietzsche’s Anti-Education
Thrusting education upon an ever-widening population only to equip them with skills to serve the “state” forms the central thesis of Friedrich Nietzsche’s, a philosopher famous for his original and
provocative ideas and a writer well known for his forceful style), Anti-Education, a published collection of a series of five lectures that he delivered at the city museum in Basel, Switzerland, between January and February 1872, which is still relevant today. Education now is dominated by two tendencies, “apparently opposed but equally ruinous in effect and eventually converging in their end results. The first is the drive for the greatest possible expansion and dissemination of education; the other is the drive for the narrowing and weakening of education.” Does everyone want an education through formal systems? Liberal values want to extend education to all, mostly sold as a route out of poverty to economic prosperity. Autonomy in formal systems of education is, thus, sacrificed when education is standardized to conform to the dictates of the state. In the twenty-first century, alternatives to formal systems of education are available: home schooling, global access to information at the click of a button, video lectures available anytime, and immersive learning.
Education Now
All modern states, so-called welfare states, have evolved into economic engines, perpetually driven by the consumption-production cycle. A huge, and constant, workforce is needed to turn the cogs of the economic wheel. Not only the noble and ideal pursuit of education is subservient to the state but it is also a part of the consumption-production cycle. Education itself is an economic activity — one only needs to look at the high cost of education in schools and colleges. Even states that offer free education do so not for altruistic, ideal reasons. Nietzsche was prescient in predicting the turn education would take in the twentieth century when he delivered those lectures, critical of the German education system when at that time it was regarded as one of the finest in Europe.
The founding fathers of the modern university system envisaged education with liberal tendencies — the pursuit of wisdom conducted in a spirit of inquiry. Specialized education, the mad race to become “specialists,” narrows oneself to one corner of the knowledge production factory. Will Durant writes in the preface to the second edition of The Story of Philosophy in 1933: “Human knowledge had become unmanageably vast; every science had begotten a dozen more, each subtler than the rest … theology crumbled … invention complicated life and war … philosophy ran away from all these battlefronts of truth, and hid itself in recondite and narrow lanes …. Human knowledge had become too great for the human mind.” Looking back standing in the twenty-first century, we can realize the enormous amount of knowledge we have created — take for instance published works in the arts and literature — that one human life will not be sufficient to assimilate all that has been produced across histories and cultures. Durant writes further: “All that remained was the scientific specialist, who knew ‘more and more about less and less’, and the philosophical speculator, who knew less and less about more and more.” Scientific knowledge is expanding at such a rate that even the so-called specialist will be caught lagging as knowledge production outpaces knowledge assimilation. The gargantuan explosion of scientific knowledge in the twenty-first century and beyond is unimaginable! Where is the end? Will there be no end because we are only relying on empirical observation for creating “knowledge.”
An Anti-Education from Today’s Education
Can education be pursued only in state-policy-driven (and state-controlled) institutions? Many academicians are already hailing the failure of the university system with some even predicting the collapse of the university. Educational reforms are never easy and, sometimes, not possible. Through education an anti-education emerges, one that aims at, and the purpose of which, is the inner development of the individual, placing equal, if not more, importance to experiences that need not be tangible in an economic reality and that an examined and speculative life has value as an end in itself. For Nietzsche, exclusion and not inclusion was true education, and the real purpose of education was to cultivate genius, the best possibility to achieve “salvation from the moment” — to live purposefully and meaningfully in the immediate driven by the absolute and the unknown.
