MSU Graduate Students Become MTU Writing Teachers

Abstract

tique of the education in his essay on history. In Nietzsche's account, either the student is bewildered and enervated by the competing standards of worth em bodied in the cultural objects of his relativistic studies, or else he settles back into the philistine complacency bred of the conviction that we moderns are at the peak of his tory because we know everything that has happened, and that we know that all those former values are merely pro ducts of their provincial times and cultures. If the human ist tries to rescue himself from this dilemma by talking about humanistic values, he will have to explain what those values are and why they are valuable. But what could they be? What application does free-floating beauty, or art for art's sake, have to the citizens and countries of our world today, when beauty and art have been severed from the formation and ends of the hearts and minds of the young? Until humanism addresses itself directly to the question of the best way of life for a human being, until the best books of the past are again read as though they might help us answer this question, it will not with stand the charge of precious irrelevance. On the other side, the utilitarian education will for all practical purposes serve the commonest human passions. For without any determination of ends, which the theory pronounces indefinable, the use will be settled in each in stance by the immediate desire of the user. Without any guidance from previous moral training or intellectual pre cepts, that desire will naturally follow untutored inclina tion. Men and women who aspire to an ampler conception of excellence will find no solace here. Although American education has been deeply affected by these two modern doctrines, we still retain a surpris ingly resilient strain of classical theory and practice in our pedagogy. So the formulation of an alternative does not call for engrafting a foreign element onto a hostile native stock, for the plant we wish to cultivate is already alive. All that is needed is to clear away the rank weeds, fertil ize, and cherish; but in order to begin this task, we have to describe the plant so that we will recognize it when we stumble upon it. This will be the theme of the rest of my essay. NOTES