Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions

Synopsis

In 1869, at the age of twenty-five, 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.