Anti-Education

<p><b>AN NYRB Classics Original</b> <p/>In 1869 at the age of twenty-four 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 ambitions. The genius of such thinkers and makers--the kind of genius that had emerged in ancient Greece--this alone was the touchstone for true understanding. But how was education to serve genius especially in a modern society marked more and more by an unholy alliance between academic specialization mass-market journalism and the militarized state? Something more than sturdy scholarship was called for. A new way of teaching and questioning a new philosophy . . . <p/>What that new way might be was the question Nietzsche broached in five vivid popular public lectures in Basel in 1872. <i>Anti-Education</i> presents a provocative and timely reckoning with what remains one of the central challenges of the modern world. <p/></p>