When Friedrich Nietzsche was offered a professorship in classical philology at the university of Basel in 1869 he was so happy he burst into song. He was only 24 at the time — a year younger than Enoch Powell, who became a professor of Greek at the university of Sydney aged 25 — and looked forward to a brilliant academic career.
Three years later, when he delivered the six lectures contained in this book, he was already showing signs of disillusionment. His teaching duties included six hours at the local gymnasium — the German equivalent of a secondary school — and he wasn’t impressed by what he found there. To anyone who’s followed the debate about failing standards in Britain’s schools that dates back to the publication of the first ‘Black Papers’ in 1969 and probably long before that, Nietzsche’s complaints will have a familiar ring to them.
The teachers possess ‘limited gifts’, the students are of a ‘low level’ and the curriculum owes far too much to ‘the plebeian “culture pages” of magazines and newspapers’. Nietzsche is particularly incensed by the claims of the gymnasiums to be providing a classical education — or should that be gymnasia?
‘I have never once found in the German gymnasium a single gossamer thread of anything that can truly be called “classical education”,’ he harrumphs. It’s all a far cry from the ‘true education’ he received — although, unusually for someone looking back at his own schooldays through rose-tinted spectacles, Nietzsche is talking about a Golden Age that existed less than ten years earlier.
The fundamental problem, according to the philosopher, is that German secondary schools have expanded too quickly in an attempt to keep pace with the growing demand for state functionaries.
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