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.