Pratt Institute

My approach to teaching:  

Following is one of my favorite discussions of pedagogy, from Nietzsche.  

Of three metamorphoses of the spirit I tell you: how the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child.  

There is much that is difficult for the spirit, the strong reverent spirit that would bear much: but the difficult and the most difficult are what its strength demands.

All these difficult things the spirit that would bear much takes upon itself; like the camel that, burdened, speeds into he desert.  

In the loneliest desert, however, the second metamorphosis occurs; here the spirit becomes a lion who would conquer his freedom and be master in his own desert. Here he seeks out his last master: he wants to fight him and his last god; for ultimate victory he want to fight with the great dragon.

Who is the great dragon whom the spirit will no longer call lord and god?   "Thou shalt" is the name of the great dragon.   But the spirit of the lion says, "I will."

To create new values--that even the lion cannot do... But...what can a child do that even the lion could not do?   The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred "Yes" is indeed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world.

 

- From Thus Spoke Zarathustra , Friedrich Nietzsche, trans: Walter Kaufmann

Thus Nietzsche describes the education of the creative person.   First they take on the burden of their tradition and learn the skills of their discipline and the materials of their culture.   Then they challenge the traditions of their culture and then, coming from their own center, with the creative innocence of a child, ("a wheel rolling out of its own center" would be a better translation), they create the new. Thus Nietzsche describes what Cooperman calls the three illiteracies: Primary literacy is the ability to read, write, and compute. Secondary literacy is familiarity with the record of ones culture. Tertiary literacy is the ability to apply the first two in ones personal, professional, social, cultural, and spiritual lives.

The Curriculum Project, something I am organizing to discuss what we teach

Link to Pratt where I teach: Pratt.edu

Some of my course outlines