ABSTRACT
At the beginning of his 1983 book, Authenticity and Learning: Nietzsche’s educational philosophy, David Cooper quotes Foucault’s celebrated comment that ‘“the only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche’s is precisely to use it”’ – even, perhaps, ‘“to deform it, make it groan and protest”’. David Cooper writes that he has unashamedly used Nietzsche to conduct a critique against fashionable educational ideas. For him those ideas are predominantly those of vocationalism, a debased kind of progressivism, and the idea of education as an initiation into the disciplines or ‘forms of knowledge’. Twenty years later, the dominant educational ideas, jargon and ideology have changed, and the focus of critique must change too. But my strategy here in this chapter is the same: to use the disturbing power of Nietzsche’s thought and writings to help unsettle educational orthodoxy and unmask, by the very Nietzschean devices of mockery and celebration in places, some of its flaws and pretensions.
