Anti-Education Quotes

“Two seemingly antagonistic forces, equally deleterious in their actions and ultimately combining to produce their results, are at present ruling over our educational institutions, although these were based originally upon very different principles. These forces are: a striving to achieve the greatest possible extension of education on the one hand, and a tendency to minimize and to weaken it on the other. The first-named would fain spread learning among the greatest possible number of people; the second would compel education to renounce its highest and most independent claims in order to subordinate itself to the service of the State.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions

“You always said that no one would strive for education if they knew how unbelievably small the number of truly educated people actually was, or ever could be. But that it was impossible to achieve even this small quota of truly educated people unless a great mass of people were tricked, seduced, into going against their nature and pursuing an education. As a result, we must never publicly betray the ridiculous disproportion between the number of truly educated people and the size of our monstrously overgrown educational system. That is the real secret of education, you said: Countless people fight for it, and think they are fighting for themselves, but at bottom it is only to make education possible for a very few.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions

“This book is intended for calm readers.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions

“I know what those who want to interrupt the beneficent, healthy sleep of the people really want. They constantly cry to the people: ‘Wake up! Become conscious! Be smart!’—and even as they pretend that the extraordinary increase in the number of schools, and the creation of a proud class of teachers in consequence, satisfies a powerful need for education, I know their real goal. They are fighting, and this is how they fight, against the natural hierarchy in the empire of the intellect; they seek to destroy the roots of the highest and noblest cultural powers that, bursting forth from the popular unconscious, have a maternal destiny: to give birth to, raise, and nurture genius.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions

“If certain words and turns of phrase habitual in today's journalism do not inspire physical disgust, then abandon your pursuit of culture.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions

“I have long since grown accustomed to looking hard at the eager advocates of so-called ‘popular education’ as it is commonly understood. Most of the time, what they consciously or unconsciously want is unfettered freedom for themselves in a universal saturnalia of barbarism. But the sacred natural order will never grant it to them: They are born to serve, to obey. Every time their creeping thoughts try to get anywhere on their wooden legs or broken wings, it only confirms the kind of clay from which Nature has made them, the mark with which she has stamped them. Education for the masses cannot be our goal—only the cultivation of the chosen individual, equipped to produce great and lasting works.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions

“All education begins with the exact opposite of what everyone praises so highly today as ‘academic freedom.’ It begins in obedience, subordination, discipline, servitude. And just as great leaders need followers, so too must the led have a leader. A certain reciprocal predisposition prevails in the hierarchy of the spirit: yes, a kind of pre-established harmony. The eternal hierarchy that all things naturally gravitate toward is just what the so-called culture now sitting on the throne of the present aims to overturn and destroy. This ‘culture’ wants to bring leaders down to the level of its compulsory servitude, or kill them off altogether; it waylays foreordained followers searching high and low for the one who is to lead them, while its intoxications deaden even their instinct to seek. If, though, wounded and battle-weary, the two sides destined for each other find a way to come together at last, the result is a deep, thrilling bliss that resounds like the strings of an eternal lyre.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions

“¿Quién podrá conduciros hasta la patria de la cultura, si vuestros guías están ciegos, aunque se hagan pasar todavía por videntes?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Sobre el porvenir de la educación

“En cualquier caso, la llamada cultura clásica tiene un único punto de partida sano y natural, es decir, la costumbre, artísticamente seria y rigurosa, de utilizar la lengua materna.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Sobre el porvenir de la educación

“Se ha apoderado de mí un desaliento general: la huida a la soledad no ha sido cosa de orgullo ni de presunción. Me”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Sobre el porvenir de la educación