Anti-Education by Friedrich Nietzsche: Review – Why Mainstream Culture, Not the Universities, Is Doing Our Best Thinking
10th February 2016
Beautifully produced by New York Review Books in a new translation, by Damion Searls, with an illuminating introduction, Anti-Education consists of five lectures Nietzsche gave at the Basel city museum in 1872. (A sixth lecture was planned, but never delivered; portions of the series were used in his book Untimely Meditations.) Presenting his critique in the form of a series of dialogues between an old philosopher and a student companion, Nietzsche argues that education (he uses the German word Bildung, a term with multiple senses but that broadly means the formation of culture and individual character) has been degraded by being subordinated to other goals. Both the German gymnasium – the secondary school that prepared students for university – and universities themselves had forfeited their true vocation, which was to “inculcate serious and unrelenting critical habits and opinions”. Instruction in independent thinking had been renounced in favour of “the ubiquitous encouragement of everyone’s so-called ‘individual personality’” – a trend Nietzsche viewed as “a mark of barbarity”. As a result, education was dominated by two tendencies, “apparently opposed but equally ruinous in effect and eventually converging in their end results. The first is the drive for the greatest possible expansion and dissemination of education; the other is the drive for the narrowing and weakening of education.” The first extends education too widely and imposes it on a population that may not want or need it, while the second expects education to surrender any claim to autonomy and submit to the imperatives of the state.
And, indeed, we appear to see that happening right before our very eyes.