Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Humboldt's model was based on two ideas of the Enlightenment: the individual and the world citizen.Humboldt believed that the university (and education in general, as in the Prussian education system) should enable students to become autonomous individuals and world citizens by developing their own powers of reasoning in an environment of academic freedom.
The term Bildung also corresponds to the Humboldtian model of higher education from the work of Prussian philosopher and educational administrator Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Thus, in this context, the concept of education becomes a lifelong process of human development, rather than mere training in gaining certain external knowledge or ...
Humboldt was a philosopher; he wrote The Limits of State Action in 1791–1792 (though it was not published until 1850, after Humboldt's death), one of the boldest defences of the liberties of the Enlightenment. It influenced John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty through which von Humboldt's ideas became known in the English-speaking world.
Humboldt's concept still forms the foundation of the contemporary German education system. [18] The Prussian system provided compulsory and basic schooling for everyone, but the significantly higher fees for attending gymnasium or a university imposed a high barrier between upper social strata and middle and lower social strata.
Humboldt's ideal pointed to a “human society of equals” which ran counter to the efforts of many members of the Bildungsbürgertum to set themselves apart. [11] By the end of the 18th century, new humanism had penetrated deeply into the Bildungsbürgertum, supported by the spiritual atmosphere in the family and by formal education. The ...
Humboldt's botany also further illustrates the concept of equilibrium and the Humboldtian ideas of the interrelationship of nature's elements. Although he was concerned with physical features of plants, he was largely focused on the investigation of underlying connections and relations among plant organisms. [ 21 ]
The Humboldtian education ideal's cultural-historical background was based on the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, which answered the demands of the Prussian bourgeoisie for enhanced general knowledge, (Allgemeinbildung), the general education and knowledge to generate a new knowledge society during the Prussian reforms of the early 19th century.
Wilhelm von Humboldt describes his purpose in writing The Limits of State Action as: "The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument … unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity."