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  • Published: 15 December 2015
  • ISBN: 9781590178942
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $36.00

Anti-Education

On the Future of Our Educational Institutions



An NYRB Classics Original from one of the most important and revered philosophers of the 19th century, Anti-Education collects five brilliant and provocative lectures that Nietzsche delivered to the public in Basel in 1872. These lectures, in a clear and precise translation by Damion Searls, question accepted ideas about education and redefine what it means to truly learn.

AN NYRB Classics Original

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 . . .

What that new way might be was the question Nietzsche broached in five vivid, popular public lectures in Basel in 1872. Anti-Education presents a provocative and timely reckoning with what remains one of the central challenges of the modern world. 

  • Published: 15 December 2015
  • ISBN: 9781590178942
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $36.00

About the author

Friedrich Nietzsche

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Prussia in 1844. After the death of his father, a Lutheran minister, Nietzsche was raised from the age of five by his mother in a household of women. In 1869 he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, where he taught until 1879 when poor health forced him to retire. He never recovered from a nervous breakdown in 1889 and died eleven years later.

Known for saying that 'god is dead,' Nietzsche propounded his metaphysical construct of the superiority of the disciplined individual (superman) living in the present over traditional values derived from Christianity and its emphasis on heavenly rewards. His ideas were appropriated by the Fascists, who turned his theories into social realities that he had never intended.

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Praise for Anti-Education

"Whether we acknowledge it or not, we continue to live within the intellectual shadow cast by Nietzsche. Postmodernism, deconstructionism, cultural relativism, the "free spirit" scorning bourgeois morality, even New Age festivals like Burning Man can all ultimately be traced to him." --Francis Fukuyama, The New York Times Book Review

"Prof. Nietzsche was one of the most prominent of modern German philosophers, and he is considered the apostle of extreme modern rationalism and one of the founders of the socialistic school, whose ideas have had such a profound influence on the growth of political and social life throughout the civilized world...his doctrines however, were inspired by lofty aspirations, while the brilliancy of his thought and diction and the epigrammatic force of his writings commanded even the admiration of his most pronounced enemies, of which he had many." --The New York Times

"Having challenged the foundations of all external authority, Nietzsche demonstrated that the intellect, once it frees itself of all binding illusions philosophical, religious, and cultural, knows no piety, no party, and no platform." --Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Making of the American Nietzsche