[Education] has lost sight of the most important thing: the end as well as the means to the end. That schooling, education is an end in itself . . . that to this end educators are needed – and not grammar-school teachers or university scholars – people have forgotten this . . . What is needed is educators who have educated themselves: superior, noble minds, proven at every moment, proved by their words and silences, mature cultures grown sweet – not the learned louts whom grammar school and university set up to the youth of today as 'higher nurse-maids.' Apart from the rarest of exceptions, educators – the foremost precondition for education – are lacking . . . schools actually achieve a brutal kind of training aimed at losing as little time as possible in making a multitude of young men usable, exploitable for public service. . . . our 'high' schools are without exception geared to the most ambiguous mediocrity, with teachers, teaching plans, teaching objectives.
– Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)
