In 1869, at the age of twenty-four, the precociously brilliant Friedrich Nietzsc
he 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, a
nd the militarized state?
