The “new” high school and Nietzsche

two opposing conceptions of education that is useful to life

Abstract

One of the arguments most used by the government to justify the need for the restructuring of high school says that, with this restructuring, the education would be more focused on the students’ life. This argument relies on the matter of reducing the common workload to all students and enabling the choice of “training pathways” according to their interests and ambitions. However, as different researchers in the education field have been demonstrating, this restructuring follows neoliberal policies and guidelines. Thus, our objective in this text consists of arguing that if the “new” high school is useful in life, the conception of life adopted by it relies on neoliberal ideas. Therefore, we aim to oppose an education that is useful to life based on Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, especially from Zarathustra’s speech on “the three transmutations of the spirit”. From a bibliographic methodology, an analysis of the legislation referring to the reform and an immanent critique of Nietzschean philosophy, we aim to show that, differently from the conception of the restructuring, the education based on Nietzsche’s ideas is not useful to life when relying on a pre-established conception of life, but is useful to make students establish their own values and their own life meaning.