Now, looking upon life more seriously and profoundly, we shall not be able to show that the censor of these schools is entirely in the wrong, when he declares that the spirit is perverted and corrupted by them. School is model, is a uniform of the spirit which all individuals are to don and wear. Hence as this school business spreads there is a dying-out of spiritual originality, a monotony of manufactured personality. Everything that belongs to the average is best conserved by school. The most proper average man is always the best scholar. But all that is above or below the average—this is often the best in a man—decays and finds no nourishment. We have but to look at the whole state of our literature in this country, to see what has become of the art of writing, of authorship, in an age bursting with pride over everybody’s being able to read and write. All the nameless insipidity and thoughtlessness written and printed today, all the mendacity and perversity of feeling, which in novels find their way into hut and salon alike might be happily spared us did not everybody think he could read, and especially write! There is no denying it, a serious question stares at us in the name of the school today. This question is above all questions of school-reform, which seem so important to us, for the improved, nay, the best school remains just—school! And something of schoolmasterism and scholasticism cleaves to school! And therefore Nietzsche was its so bitter foe because he would have _men_, men who spoke and thought and felt powerfully and not as the scribes! Nietzsche was its foe because he would have among men, personalities, individualities, diversities, not uniformity and identity of spiritual life.