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Education in an Age of Nihilism

Education and Moral Standards

By Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith, Paul Standish

Published December 14th 2000 by Routledge – 272 pages

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Description

This book addresses concerns about educational and moral standards in a world increasingly characterised by nihilism. On the one hand there is widespread anxiety that standards are falling; on the other, new machinery of accountability and inspection to show that they are not. The authors in this book state that we cannot avoid nihilism if we are simply laissez-faire about values, neither can we reduce them to standards of performance, nor must we return to traditional values. They state that we need to create a new set of values based on a critical assessment of contemporary practice in the light of a number of philosophical texts that address the question of nihilism, including the work of Nietzsche.