About 200 years ago, an obscure Prussian philosopher named Wilhelm von Humboldt created the world’s first education system. He was also behind the modern research university.
These breakthroughs in education have been adopted around the world. Yet very few people have even heard of Humboldt, let alone his extraordinary accomplishments.
In 1806, the Prussian forces of King Friedrich Wilhelm III started a war with Napoleon, Emperor of France.
Thousands died in the twin battles of Jena and Auerstedt. Napoleon won, meaning a large area of Prussia came under the control of the French.
At the time, Wilhelm von Humboldt was a mid-level aristocrat and Prussian Ambassador to the Vatican in Rome.
With his country defeated and in shatters, Humboldt was called back to Berlin, and demoted to a lowly position within the Ministry of the Interior.
Humboldt had the job for only a year and a half, but during that time, succeeded in creating the public education system — from primary school through to university.
“Within a very short period of time… he just radically reformed the whole system,” said Philipp von Turk. Former director at JP Morgan Chase in New York, he returned to university and researched the remarkable Humboldt.
“It was really under Humboldt that the notion of universal mandatory education was implemented.”
The core of Humboldt’s thinking on education is ‘Bildung,’ a word that first appeared around the late 13th century, when the Bible was translated from Latin into German. It comes from the idea that a person carries in their soul the image of God, and use it to build those ideals within themselves.
Bildung’s meaning was static for the next 500 years, but by the late 18th century, German poets and philosophers began to reshape it. Humboldt joined the debate. For him, Bildung was non-secular. He saw it as the ability to see and manifest one’s own, individual potential.
In an essay called Theory of Bildung in 1793, he writes: “What do we demand of a nation? Of an Age? Of entire mankind, if it is to occasion respect and admiration? We demand that Bildung, wisdom, and virtue, as powerfully and universally propagated as possible…that it augment its inner worth to such an extent that the concept of humanity, if taken from its example alone, would be of a rich and worthy substance.”
It’s a very powerful concept, says Philipp von Turk, who points to philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a seminal influence on Humboldt’s concept of Bildung.
“One way to look at this in terms of the purpose of education [is] with Rousseau: the world is bad. The purpose of education is to teach a person to develop [their] full capacities — free of all constraints. That might be introduced by commercial interests, by vocations, by the demands of the state,” Von Turk explained.
“The focus is on the development of the personality to the fullest extent. And then the person with this education is then in a position to confront [their] time and to make it better.”
Von Turk says once you consider the enormous potential human beings have, “you begin to think about how to develop that in a maximalist way, you begin to get to the concept of Bildung.”
For Humboldt, a better world starts with a society of self-aware, independent thinkers.
“That means that the students are not just memorizing facts and material that they then spit out in an exam at the end to prove that they’ve learned a lot. But it is about teaching oneself, cultivating oneself in order to learn what it means to do research. So that you have the capability of actually doing your own research and not just memorizing the results of somebody else’s research,” said Mitchell Ash, professor emeritus of modern history at the University of Vienna in Austria.
“The idea is to develop in yourself the capabilities of critical thinking and comprehension of high-level theory and philosophy, philosophical principles that will enable you to engage whatever you’re engaging in at a high intellectual level.”
In a letter to the King, Ash says, Humboldt wrote that Bildung would produce better civil servants, “because they weren’t just robots carrying out the decrees of a king, but they were able to have the capability of understanding the principles behind the policies and therefore be able to enact them more effectively,” said Ash.
“So Bildung is not just something that people do for their own amusement. It’s about improving the intellectual capabilities of at least a segment of the population.”
Yet over the years, as Humboldt’s public education system was adopted, modified and spread around the world, Bildung — the cultivation of our human potential — may well have been the critical piece left out.
Soon, the state’s influence on education took hold, with its own agenda. This is explored in part two of the documentary, Humboldt’s Ghost.
*This episode was presented by Karl Turner and produced by Mary Lynk.
Guests in this episode:
Philipp von Türk is a former managing director of the legal department at JP Morgan Chase in New York. In his retirement, he returned to graduate school and is a Wilhelm von Humboldt enthusiast.
Mitchell Ash is a professor emeritus of modern history at the University of Vienna in Austria.
Paul Axelrod is a professor emeritus at York University’s Faculty of Education in Toronto.
Gabor Maté is an acclaimed Canadian author, and physician. He’s also a former high school English teacher.
