The teacher as optimistic nutritionist

The aim of this paper is to offer an account of the teacher as optimistic nutritionist. Drawing on recent theoretical work seeking to identify and elucidate the main components of the optimistic nutritionist as an ethical ideal (by way of Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s ethical theories), this paper proposes a model of ethical teaching that opts for a different route from that of amodel grounded in moral exemplarism. This route is not oriented around admiration and imitation, but rather around the axioms of selectivity and selfishness. Instead of grounding educational transformation in the student’s ability to emulate the teacher (or the exemplars identified by the teacher), educational transformation is here grounded in an aspirational account where the self-cultivation of the student is influenced and promoted by a combination of practical embodied experimentation and the guidance of the teacher qua optimistic nutritionist.