A Study on Critical Exploration of Nietzsche’s View of Liberal Arts Education

Abstract

At the invitation of the Basel Education Committee, the young Nietzsche, who was a professor at the University of Basel, offered five lectures on education. The collection of these lectures is called “On the Future of Our Educational Institutions.” In this lecture, Nietzsche critiqued German schools at the time, particularly their liberal arts education, and proposed alternatives. The goal of this research is to uncover the significance of Nietzsche's view on liberal arts education as presented in his speech, as well as to investigate its applicability and limitations to liberal arts education in Korea today. Chapter II provides an overview of 19th-century Germany relevant to the lectures, Chapter III analyzes the main contents of Nietzsche's view on liberal arts education as demonstrated in the lecture, and Chapter IV investigates the potential of Nietzsche's views in the context of today's universities. Nietzsche identified the problems of mass education caused by education expansion policies, as well as the fragmentation and practicalization of knowledge caused by education diminution policies, and proposed an educational view based on the ‘metaphysics of genius’ as an alternative. Nietzsche saw the purpose and goal of liberal arts education as acquiring a sense of ancient Greece and the ability to think like a Greek in order to create a new German culture. While Nietzsche’s view on the elite education and the ancient Greek culture implicit in his discourses of liberal arts education is difficult to accept for twenty-first-century universities, Nietzsche's point regarding fragmentation and practicalization of knowledge that arise from viewing universities as academic institutions rather than liberal arts institutions allows us to critically reflect on the nature of liberal arts education in today's universities.