By Friedrich Nietzsche, from Anti-Education, which will be published in November by New York Review Books. The volume gathers five lectures on “the future of our educational institutions” that the philosopher presented at Basel’s city museum in 1872, when he was twenty-seven and a professor of philology. The lectures take the form of a fictional dialogue. Here, the voice is that of the cantankerous “old philosopher” who is the conversation’s main speaker. A Gymnasium is an elite secondary school. Translated from the German by Damion Searls.

When someone from abroad wants to learn about our university system, his first…