PETER M. ROJCEWICZ, PHD

Bainbridge Island, WA

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhDPeter M. Rojcewicz, PhD • YouYouLeadership Consultant; Education Management Advisor; Arts Education Specialist; Applied Humanities Mentor; Noetic Learning Theorist; Folklore Belief Materials Scholar; Award-winning Poet

Nietzsche, in “On the Future of Our Educational Institutions,” makes distinction between “institutions for teaching culture and institutions for teaching how to succeed in life.” Once dedicated to broadly developing the personal and social self, education today enhances the appetite for material consumption, and in this context, almost everything is measured by a cost-benefit analysis and leads to cultural and epistemological conformity, the commodification of consciousness, and the flop house of alienation. The arts and humanities are denigrated by some as ‘anti-disciplines’ whose only value is to stimulate the established sciences (E.O. Wilson, On Human Nature). Despite having a philosophy degree and a Ph.D. in neoclassical social theory from a quality German university, Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies, sees no present value in a classic liberal arts education in a techno-scientific era. Recently, at the Davos economic conference in Switzerland, he confidently declared, and without a sense of misfortune, that AI “will destroy humanities jobs.” Folk and indigenous wisdom traditions, even less regarded than the humanities, are frequently considered feckless to enhance life success and so do not count as significant.

In our techno-financial society, “the educational ideal is the intelligent and skilled technician, not the intellectual and scholarly academic or layperson of yesteryears.” (Rahman, “Betrayal of Intellect”). Commercialism impersonates intelligence. Profitability, efficiency, and career preparation overcome knowledge and truth. Students are valued as ‘consumers’ and faculty as ‘employees’, rather than engaged members of shared learning communities. The neoliberal market model promotes the flawed notion that the consumer alone speaks in the name of education. Within that model, the power of earning belittles the pursuit of learning. Long term capital gain is the premier goal.

When people are treated as instrumental means to others’ ends, they are dehumanized, removed from their caring, devoid of spontaneity, and crippled as to what is integral to themselves and others. Treating nature as an exploitable ‘standing reserve’ (Heidegger) of raw materials and people as essentially transactional tokens gives impetus to kleptocratic leadership. In this context, education undergoes a degeneration of institutional Being and underserves culture. In addition to skilled technicians and titans of capital gain, a salutogenic culture requires artist-intellectuals. Nietzsche stated, “This is the basic idea of culture insofar as it assigns only one task to every single one of us: to promote inside and outside of ourselves the generation of the philosopher, the artist, and the saint, and thus to work at the perfection of nature.” He understood that by increasingly adapting itself to the techno-economic needs of the age, education abdicates its authority to guide the age.