The Death of Deep Learning in the Age of Punditry
What We Can Learn from Nietzsche’s Critique of the Academic System
“The Thinker” Holding his chin thinking how to hold the chin and watch the computer do the thinking. —William Marr, Autumn Window
In 1869, at the age of 24, a young and brilliant Friedrich Nietzsche was appointed to a professorship of classical philology at the University of Basel. The appointment, however, quickly led to disillusionment. Nietzsche very quickly began to fall out of favor with the current state of academia and started wondering whether the discipline he loved was really for him. A year after his appointment, Nietzsche resolved to expose the entire Prussian system of education. A few years later, the plan came together in a series of five public lectures that he delivered in Basel’s city museum, titled On the Future of Our Educational Institutions. In these lectures, newly translated and published by New York Review Books under the title Anti-Education, Nietzsche describes in a series of fictional dialogues between a philosopher and his student all the perils of his educational climate. But Nietzsche, ever the visionary, was not merely a critic of his own time—he was a prophet of modernity’s ills. His warnings, striking in their prescience, describe not just 19th-century Germany, but our own era, in which true learning is undermined by the relentless pressures of immediacy, mass opinion and the insatiable demand for reaction. What was a creeping danger in Nietzsche’s time has now metastasized into an all-out war against deep thought.
There was a time when the student, upon leaving his teacher’s side, carried with him the weight of ancient words. The echo of Homer’s hexameters, the dialectic of Plato, the back and forth of a Talmudic passage—these were once companions to a young mind stretching itself toward greatness. But Nietzsche saw the first tremors of a coming collapse. He watched as students, having spent the day in communion with the greats, reached eagerly for the daily newspaper, surrendering themselves to the transient and ephemeral. "The daily newspaper has effectively replaced education," he warned. “Anyone who still lays claim to culture or education, even a scholar, typically relies on a sticky layer of journalism…to grout the gaps between every form of life, every social position, every art, every science, every field.”1 The soul’s slow cultivation, its careful attunement to the eternal, was being undone by the fleeting chatter of the present.
Nietzsche’s fictional student then laments just how difficult teaching has become when the newspaper is so prevalent. It is not hard to hear Nietzsche’s own disillusionment in these words:
Think how useless a teacher’s greatest labors are now, when he tries to lead one single student back to the infinitely distant and elusive Hellenic world, the true homeland of our culture, and an hour later that same student reaches for a newspaper or popular novel or one of those scholarly books whose style bears the repulsive mark of today’s educational barbarism! (emphasis added)2
Our digital age has only amplified the problem Nietzsche saw in newspapers: they do not cultivate wisdom but dictate what is deemed true, relevant, and worth knowing. With its bold headlines and urgent format, the newspaper lures readers into believing that all one needs to know today is contained within its pages. To read a newspaper is to surrender oneself to an editorial board’s choices. Newspapers create informed individuals, not educated ones.
True education, however, requires something entirely different. It demands patience, discipline, and a willingness to struggle with ideas that do not immediately resolve themselves. It requires submission—not to the whims of an editorial board, but to the weight of history, to the great thinkers who have shaped our civilization and to the rigor of logic, argument, and contemplation. Books do not simply present knowledge; they demand something of their reader. They force him to wrestle, to reread, to sit in silence with a difficult passage and return to it again and again. Unlike the newspaper, which serves as a fleeting digest of the moment, a book—especially a great one—does not expire.
Educated people, one hopes, are humble people. To become an educated person means to submit oneself to those who came before us, to sit at their feet and drink of their water. Informed people, by contrast, can be a haughty bunch, for they too quickly claim to be knowledgeable about a topic just after a mere shallow reading of a newspaper, or in our age, from listening to a podcast or reading a Tweet. Nietzsche saw this problem in his own time as well, noting that the educational system was too quick to allow students to share their opinions:
They treat every student as being capable of literature, as “allowed” to have opinions about the most serious people and things whereas true education will strive with all its might precisely to “suppress” this ridiculous claim to independence of judgement on the part of the young person, imposing instead strict obedience to the scepter of the genius.3
He further notes that “so few people nowadays realize that one in a thousand, at most, is justified in putting his writing before the world.” Deference and humility are fundamental character traits that all scholars and lifelong learners must possess. But when you can claim to be informed just by reading the newspaper, you are quick to share your opinions. Too many professors today demand of their students to “share their opinions” on any subject matter. No one, it seems, is calling for the cultivation of deference and humility, for the truth that young minds must first be steeped in the wisdom of the ages, drinking deeply from its well, before they can hope to offer a worthy thought of their own.
Today, our situation is much, much worse than Nietzsche could have ever imagined. With the rise of digital media and the speed of modern life, what Nietzsche feared as a flaw in the educational system of his day has metastasized in our own. Today, the demand for quick responses and instant opinions eclipses the spirit and ethic of true learning. The very nature of modern media—whether it be the internet, social media, or digital news—encourages and rewards this superficial engagement with ideas.
Take, for example, the phenomenon of punditry, which Nietzsche would undoubtedly have seen as the logical extension of the problems he identified. Pundits rule the TV and podcasting landscapes. Though they often lack deep expertise in the subjects they discuss, they now hold immense influence over public discourse. The irony, of course, is that as a pundit grows more vocal, their audience becomes more convinced that their words deserve attention. Pundits thrive on extreme, attention-grabbing claims, but when challenged on depth or logic, they often falter—without ever growing humble.
A recent and glaring example of this comes from the media world itself: the case of Darryl Cooper, a so-called “popular historian,” who appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast to offer an absurd, revisionist take on World War II. When Carlson introduced Cooper as one of the best and most popular historians of our time, I paused to think if I had heard of him. I had not. Nor could I discover any book bearing his name that related to WWII. Cooper was none of the things that Carlson described him as being.
Cooper’s most attention grabbing and pernicious assertion that Winston Churchill was the chief villain of WWII—a claim that runs contrary to decades of scholarly research and historical consensus—was nothing short of absurd, and some of the greatest historians of our time took Cooper to task. Yet, in the course of a single broadcast, this dubious pundit attempted to convince a significant portion of the public that his interpretation was valid. Here was a pundit claiming to be a historian, without the credentials or expertise to justify such sweeping conclusions, leading an audience of millions to potentially abandon the truth in favor of a deeply misleading and nefarious narrative. The spectacle of this unqualified individual wielding influence over public opinion exposes the true danger of modern media, a danger that Nietzsche had seen in his own time—it allows the uninformed to hold sway over the public conversation, while the deep and painstaking work of historians, scholars, and true educators goes largely ignored.
The cure for this decay is clear: we must abandon digital media as much as possible and refuse to seek wisdom in places that do not cultivate it. The mind is not nourished by tweets, headlines, or soundbites but by books—by the slow and deliberate study of history, philosophy, and the great works of civilization.
We must resist the transient by choosing contemplation over reaction, patience over immediacy, depth over distraction. This is not just about reading more books; it is about reshaping the way we engage with knowledge. It requires rejecting the illusion that wisdom can be obtained through a screen and returning to the kind of learning that demands time, discipline, and humility.
If we want to reclaim the lost art of thinking, we must make a radical break from the culture of instant information. Our intellectual and cultural future depends on it.
Friedrich Nietzsche et al., Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, New York Review Books Classics (New York: New York Review Books, 2016), 19.
Nietzsche et al., 19.
Nietzsche et al., 26.
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Wonderful essay, Phillip. The confidence behind your diagnosis is a much needed bulwark against the never-ending justification of technology in education.
Excellent read touching on devastating truth about our time and its impatient reliance on technology for knowledge while disregarding true sources of wisdom.