Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions

In 1869, at age 25, the precociously brilliant Friedrich Nietzsche was appointed to a professorship of classical philology at the University of Basel. He seemed marked for a successful and conventional academic career. Then the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the music of Wagner transformed his sense of purpose. The genius of such thinkers and makers--like the genius of the ancient Greeks--was the only touchstone for true understanding. How then was education to answer to such genius?  Something more than sturdy scholarship was called for. A new way of teaching and questioning, a new philosophy....

What that new way might be was the question Nietzsche broached in five vivid and popular lectures delivered to the public in Basel in 1872. Following a chance encounter in the country, an old philosopher, his former student, and two very wet-behind-the-ears undergraduates embroil themselves in a discussion of the current state of education, devoted, they concur, on the one hand to the democratization of shallow learning, and on the other to fostering a narrow specialization that serves the interests of industry and the state. Neither of these, the philosopher insists, constitutes true learning, which can only arise out of a determined attention to the genius of language, written and spoken, instead of practical ends, however newsworthy. 

Composed in emulation (and to some degree as a satire) of a Platonic dialogue, Anti-Education presents a stimulating, provocative, and thoroughly timely reckoning with one of the great problems of the day.