Monday I reclaimed the word utopia. Today I want to reclaim another word the twentieth century ruined.

Übermensch.

I can feel the discomfort from here. The word carries weight that’s hard to set down. It conjures images of the thirties and forties, of supremacist ideology, of a philosophy twisted into justification for atrocity. If utopia makes people uncomfortable, Übermensch makes them recoil.

But Nietzsche didn’t mean what was later made of him. And the distance between his original idea and its appropriation matters, not just historically, but for how we think about education now.

We’re living through a period of acceleration that has no obvious precedent. Climate disruption, technological transformation, political fragmentation, economic uncertainty, the rapid reshaping of what On work means and what lives can look like. The ground beneath our institutions is shifting faster than those institutions can adapt. Education keeps promising to prepare young people for this world, but it’s preparing them for a stability that no longer exists.

In this context, the question Nietzsche was grappling with feels urgent. When the old certainties dissolve, when the path forward isn’t clear, when the future can’t be predicted with confidence, what does it mean to live fully? What kind of person can navigate that uncertainty without collapsing into despair or rigidity?

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

His answer wasn’t domination. It was self-overcoming. The Übermensch creates their own values rather than waiting to inherit them, takes responsibility for their own becoming rather than conforming to what’s expected, faces uncertainty with courage rather than retreating into dogma or paralysis. That’s not a figure of supremacy. It’s a figure of agency.

I’ve been thinking about what this means for education. Not because I want to turn Nietzsche into a curriculum designer, but because the question he was asking is one we rarely ask clearly: what kind of human being is education designed to produce?

The current system was designed for a more stable world. It rewards students who can absorb what they’re told, reproduce it on demand, and compete successfully against their peers for credentials.

The ideal student, in this model, is adaptive, compliant, and skilled at navigating systems built by others. These capacities made sense when the path from qualification to employment to security was relatively clear. That clarity is disappearing.

When I imagine education for the world we’re actually entering, I find myself moving beyond Nietzsche. His vision was more solitary than mine.

He spoke of ‘stealing from the herd,’ of the exceptional individual who rises above. And the language itself carries the gendered weight of ‘overman’ and ‘superman’ that shaped how it was received and misused.

From Übermensch to Becoming-Being

If Nietzsche’s Übermensch was the person who overcomes, perhaps what our moment needs is the becoming-being: someone still overcoming, but never alone.

The becoming-being is a phrase from my recent academic work. A person in process rather than a finished product. Someone who understands that they’re embedded in relationships, in communities, in ecosystems, in time itself, and who takes that embeddedness seriously rather than treating themselves as isolated individuals competing for advantage.

The becoming-being keeps Nietzsche’s core insight: we are responsible for our own becoming, we must create rather than merely inherit.

But it updates that insight for a world that needs connection as much as courage. Self-overcoming, yes, but not in isolation. As someone who understands that their becoming is entangled with the becoming of others.

The becoming-being isn’t born that way. They’re cultivated, in part through futures literacy: the capacity to understand that the future is not fixed, to hold multiple possibilities without collapsing into anxiety or false certainty, to see oneself as a participant in shaping what comes next.

It’s a learnable capability, not prediction or optimism, and it’s foundational to navigating uncertainty with agency rather than fear.

Futures literacy alone isn’t enough, though. Young people also need to be asked to apply themselves to something bigger than themselves. To use their skills, their learning, their emerging agency in service of problems that matter beyond personal advancement. The becoming-being grows by engaging with the world, by taking on challenges that stretch them, by understanding that their education has a purpose that extends past credentialing and into contribution.

Education rarely talks this way. We spend our time on skills, competencies, outcomes, preparing students for the workforce, for citizenship, for the challenges ahead. These aren’t wrong things to talk about. But they tend to treat the student as a vessel to be filled rather than a person becoming.

They focus on what students should know and be able to do, rather than who they might become and how they might shape the world around them.

I find something hopeful in this work of reclamation. Not because Nietzsche had all the answers. He didn’t, and some of what he missed matters. But his question cuts through a lot of what passes for educational debate. We argue endlessly about curriculum content, assessment methods, technological tools.

We argue less often about what kind of human being we’re trying to cultivate, and whether that vision is adequate to the world those humans will actually inhabit.

The Übermensch becomes the becoming-being. A person who has taken responsibility for their own becoming, whose growth is entangled with the growth of others, who moves through the world with agency and care rather than dominance.

The twentieth century stole this idea and made it monstrous. The thirties and forties showed what that distortion costs. And anyone watching the world carefully knows that spectre hasn’t fully receded. Which is precisely why the reclamation matters. If we don’t offer better visions of human becoming, worse ones fill the space.

The future is not something to fear. It is something to build, together. But building in uncertain times requires people who don’t need certainty to act. Who understand that the future isn’t fixed, that their choices matter, that becoming is never finished.

I wonder what it would look like if we designed schools around that. Futures literacy sitting alongside numeracy and literacy as a core entitlement. Young people asked not just what they want to be, but what problems they want to solve, what futures they want to help create.

That’s what I’m reaching for. A person still becoming who they might yet be, in a world still becoming what it might yet be. Connected to others in that becoming. Responsible for it.

There’s hope in that. More hope, I think, than in any promise of stability we can no longer keep.