On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, the work that was to have been Nietzsche's second book until he canceled the contract and used portions in his Untimely Meditations, is a substantial call for radical educational reform presented in the form of a prolonged narrative dialogue. Here Nietzsche, through the characters of this prolonged narrative dialogue, starts from a consideration of German educational institutions and rises to a consideration of what is needed for true, or classical, education. Though Nietzsche engages his contemporary world more in this work than in perhaps any other, this engagement is neither arbitrary nor limiting. Starting where one is and has grown up happens to be the necessary grounding of the organic unity that belongs to true culture
