Anti-Education ─ On the Future of Our Educational Institutions

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. A new way of teaching and questioning, a new philosophy...

What that new way might be was the question Nietzsche broached in five vivid, popular public lectures in Basel in 1872. Composed in emulation (and to some degree as a satire) of a Platonic dialogue,Anti-Education presents a provocative and timely reckoning with what remains one of the great problems of modern societies.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher, essayist, and critic whose writings about morality, truth, language, aesthetics, and nihilism are considered cornerstones of Western philosophy.

Damion Searls has translated many classic twentieth-century writers, including Proust, Rilke, Elfriede Jelinek, Christa Wolf, Hans Keilson, and Herman Hesse. For NYRB Classics, he edited Henry David Thoreau'sThe Journal: 1837-1861, translated Nescio's Amsterdam Stories, and Robert Walser'sA Schoolboy's Diary. He has received Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Cullman Center fellowships and is currently writing a book about Hermann Rorschach and the cultural history of the Rorschach test.

Paul Reitter is professor of Germanic languages and literatures and director of the Humanities Institute at Ohio State. His work has appeared in both scholarly journals and venues such asHarper's Magazine, Bookforum, The Paris Review, The Nation, andThe Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of three books, and he recently collaborated with Jonathan Franzen and Daniel Kehlmann onThe Kraus Project.

Chad Wellmon is the author of Becoming Human: Romantic Anthropology and the Embodiment of Freedom andOrganizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University. He is Associate Professor of German Studies at the Institute for Advance Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He is also editor of theInfernal Machine.