Ideas - How our education system is far from its original ideals

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

Acclaimed author Gabor Maté joins the conversation in part two of our series exploring Wilhelm von Humboldt’s public education system. Maté is a former English teacher. In this episode we ask: Is Humboldt's 200-year-old system equipped to meet the challenging demands of the 21st century? And does it still reflect his ideals, especially at the university level? *This episode concludes our two-part series. It originally aired on April 16, 2024.

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Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. In 1809 in Prussia, a mid-level bureaucrat, Wilhelm von Humboldt, pulled off an incredible feat. yet most people have never heard of him. Who was Wilhelm von Humboldt? He was a scholar, he was a man of letters, he was a statesman, and he was an educational reformer. He articulated ideals that would resonate for a long time until today. In only 18 months, he created the world's first public education system.

The template is still being used around the world today. But whether Humboldt's core ideals remain, that is at issue. Humboldt believed the main purpose of education was to create independent, critical thinkers. That was how you built a better and more just society through the strength of educated individuals from all walks of life. Around the turn of the 19th century, Humboldt wrote, To judge a man means nothing other than to ask, what content does he give to the form of humanity. What concept should we have of humanity if he were its only representative? In the first of this two-part series, we looked at the remarkable life and work of Wilhelm von

Humboldt. In this final episode, Ideas contributor and economic historian Carl Turner looks at how Humboldt's model of public education came to be adopted throughout the world. Now, if you're like me, you were told when you were young that you needed to get an education. Why? Because that's how you find your place in this world. Education gets you a job. The better the education, the better the job. The better the job, the more money you make. In short, education is the promise of prosperity. But not according to Wilhelm von Humboldt, the person who first came up with the public education system in 1809. For him, it wasn't so much about getting a job. As we discussed in part one, it was about nurturing Bil-Dung. Today, it's a

concept that is often synonymous with education. But for Humboldt, Bil-Dung meant much more, and it was at the core of his philosophy of education. Bil-Dung was originally a mystical concept from the Middle Ages, that Humboldt later reinterpreted and secularized, originally based on the Christian notion of holding the image of God within oneself in order to strive to be a better human. But Humboldt believed that it was education, not God, that could make one realize their full potential. Humboldt's revised theory of Bildong was not just a reflection of his own philosophy. It also incorporated ideas from some of the great thinkers around his time, people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Swiss-born philosopher was a key member of the European Enlightenment, the

age of reason. Rousseau died in 1778, two years after Humboldt's birth, and Rousseau's book, Emile, a treatise on the nature of education, though somewhat esoteric, was a source of inspiration to Humboldt and his contemporaries. Some of Rousseau's ideas influenced Humboldt's vision of Bill Dung. It really also reflects this theme of Rousseau's, that education is not just about learning a trade or a profession. Rather, it is the education of the whole person in all of his capacities, unconstrained by presumptions that might be created by society or the professions and so on. It has an anti, sort of, or non-vocational aspect to it. You know, the purpose of building is to create somebody who, in all of his fullness, and all of this comes, you know,

I think originally from Rousseau, so that he is able to navigate life in just the best way possible. Philip von Tirk is the former managing director of the legal department at J.P. Morgan Chase in New York. In his retirement, he returned to graduate school and is a Wilhelm von Humboldt enthusiast. You know, one of the things that Humboldt says is everybody should have this foundational education.

An educated public? everyone? Well, that's revolutionary. As Humboldt wrote, If we glance at the most important revolutions in history, we see at once that the greatest number of these originated in the periodical revolutions of the human mind. So how does Humboldt's template for public education get spread around the world? At least the idea of a standardized primary-to-university structure. Let's go back to the turn of the 19th century. This is the period before Humboldt's model was adopted around the world. Take education in Canada, for example, before it became a country. And of course,

what was happening in Canada mirrored to a certain extent what was happening south of the border. Education was voluntary. It was tuition-based. It was mostly run by churches, and there were a number of entrepreneurial kinds of initiatives too by people who set up educational institutions it was less available in rural parts of Canada more available in towns and villages as they grew there was some state support for schooling in the early part of the 19th century but it was it was minimal education was delivered in private homes church basements there was tutoring, there were grammar schools for boys, and there were academies for girls.

Paul Axelrod is Professor Emeritus at York University's Faculty of Education in Toronto. There wasn't a form of standardization yet in the construction of schooling or in the delivery of education. One of the things that's most interesting about schooling in the early 19th century, in the late 18th century, is we think of schooling as half. from the bottom up, from elementary, you know, first you build elementary schools and then secondary schools and then universities. That's not exactly the perspective that the authorities and leaders of the various British colonies had. Their initiatives were first about higher education. The first university in Canada was at Windsor, Nova Scotia, in 1791, an Anglican

institution called King's College. There was a King's College in New Brunswick in 1800. And And one planned for Upper Canada, Ontario in the early 19th century, but it didn't get off the ground until 1843. The reason for this is because the British authorities and the people that ran the colonies on their behalf wanted leadership. They wanted clergymen. The ideal was that Christian higher learning with an emphasis, certainly in Upper Canada, on Anglicanism, would be the leader. leading light of the community. And those that didn't become clergymen, well, they would probably work in government positions or have other kinds of high status positions of responsibility. So getting the right leadership was considered important. In Quebec, in the 17th century,

in the 1660s, the Grand Semino was created. That eventually became LaValle University. So the provision of education for large numbers of people wasn't the highest priority. at the outset. Now, the priority for people living in these wilderness communities, especially those that were in rural areas, was that they had to survive. They had to build their homes. They had to plant their crops. There wasn't a huge amount of time for schooling. But it wasn't entirely absent, as I've pointed out. And the appetite for schooling grows as we moved through the 19th century. In fact, this growing appetite for a comprehensive system of education is happening around the

world. Education publicly funded, eventually compulsory and free elementary education, is a campaign that is happening in England, in Ireland, in the United States, and elsewhere. And it had actually happened even earlier in Prussia in the 18th century. Indeed, thanks to our man Wilhelm von Humboldt, his public education system was attracting a lot of international attention. Americans, for example, were traveling to Prussia to check it out. Philip von Turk. When the Americans came over here, they would see that and say, hey, this is pretty good.

We're going to do this in our country, too. One of these Americans was Horace Mann from Massachusetts. An abolitionist and Whig politician, he came to be known as the father of American education. This was in part because of a significant trip he made in 1843. While honeymooning with his second wife, Mary Tyler Peabody, a teacher and also an education reformer, they visited various countries throughout Europe, including Prussia. Both man and his wife were struck by how advanced Prussia's education system was compared to the United States. You know, Horace Mann would bring back the system, the Prussian educational system,

and set it up in Massachusetts, from where it spread to New York and other states. There was almost like an international conversation going on. Paul Axelrod, as unlikely as that might seem, about the need and importance for schooling. And some of the common themes are, this is a time of state building and nation building. It's also a time of economic change, but these various countries, the United States, Canada, and England, are at different points in their own economic development. and yet they bring about compulsory schooling around the 1870s at the same time. So in Canada, the United States and elsewhere, public education systems are beginning to spring up. And they're inspired by the Prussian system of education, a system, Wilhelm von Humbold, devised.

And it's a system in which everything from teacher training, curricula, textbooks, and exams are standardized and administered by the state. Government officials also thought this would create a more orderly, society. They believed that we needed schools to provide order, and the order would come from cultivating the values of loyalism, loyalty to the British crown. So that would be a theme that would be taught, promoted in the schools. Respect for emerging middle class values, respect for property, respectability, strong discipline. And there was also a social class. dimension to this as well. This is a period when workers, the immigration numbers are quite huge. Some come to build canals. Irish workers are building canals and there's a sort of caricatured

stereotypical view of them, that they're not disciplined, nor are their children. Well, we better get their kids in schools so that we can mold and moderate their behavior. Again, these are caricatures. People defined each other in this era through assumptions about their race and their national origins and assigned motives. We wouldn't do that now. It was done then. Virtually everyone did. And so schools are there to provide the kind of regulation, molding of behavior for the creation of citizens that could participate in community life. Of course, there's a dangerous aside to this type of social modeling. Humboldt's ideal was to graduate independent thinkers, able to critique the state to make it better, not be puppets of the government. And then there's

a question, who is public education for? Well, it's for the public, everyone. So what happens when the state doesn't want everyone in the same classroom? We know more about that now than we used to as a result of the research that's happened around the issue of resident. schools. You know, the perceptions of aboriginals in the 19th century were twofold, I would say, and I would argue that these were common views. It would be hard to find people, non-Aboriginal people, who didn't share these views. On the one hand, they were perceived as warlike and threatening, and you find the word barbarous used in many publications. Something to be feared, unknown, and confronted as white settlers settled in Canada.

On the other hand, there was this perception of aboriginals and indigenous people as childlike, a kind of extension of nature that should be perhaps dealt with. This was a caricatured, of course, inaccurate view. And the ways in which aboriginals should be dealt with is through repression or pushed decide by settlement or assimilated. And this was the goal of the schools for Aboriginals that were created both before the formal rise of residential schools and after. These schools were run by Christian organizations and converting aboriginals to Christianity was a huge priority. They were not going to enter public schooling. They were going to

to be educated, if at all, through the separate system. And that was formalized in the early 1880s. And we know that the kinds of conditions that existed in those schools were very difficult, brutal, the kind of treatment that these children experienced has been exposed for what it is. And the impact was severe. and in the pursuit of education for all, yet another group is left out, African Canadians. Yeah, so how were African-Canadian students treated during this period?

The welcome mat really wasn't rolled out. Now, one of the unintended consequences of the separate school system in Ontario and similarly in Nova Scotia was that, legislation was used to create separate schools for black students, but in ways that were questionable, possibly not even entirely legal, school boards were under such pressure from their communities that when kids showed up in class, black kids, many parents objected to them being there. And so by using some of the technical components of the separate schools Act where a certain number of kids in the community were of a particular religious denomination

or, in this case, race, they would be educated separately. And certainly it appears they were forced out of some schools. Now, some black educators actually didn't mind that because it meant that the kids were not going to be subjected to mistreatment in schools with other kids who weren't black. And, you know, they may have experienced less difficulty in some of the separate schools. schools. Ontario's rule was that every kid had to go to school and where there were sufficient numbers of kids and it was a very low number to justify the creation of a separate school for blacks, they were created.

So this flawed and questionably public school system continues to be built in Canada and more and more people are seeing the value of an education. Paul Axelrod. There is an emerging sense of the need for literacy. You know, as farming becomes more important, and this is still overwhelmingly in agricultural world in Canada, farmers need to know increasingly how to read, and they need to be numerate in order to participate in trade and commerce. And this is a motivation to send children to school as well.

There's a social status associated with having some degree of education, and especially for those who are sent to these academies and grammar schools, that, again, they were very different in quality and even purposes. Some of them look like elementary schools. Some of them look more like high schools, and even others felt themselves sophisticated enough to be almost like the early years of university. So there was a real range of these schools. It's also a time of economic change, but these various countries, the United States, Canada, and England are at different points in their own economic development, and yet they bring about compulsory schooling around the 1870s at the same time. So economic change is certainly one of the motivations, but it's not the only one that weighed into the building of public education. There was also the perception of childhood that was evolving through this time. You know, before the rise of schooling, kids spent most of their time in the world of adults. Kids were working.

There wasn't a distinctively formally carved out world of childhood. But in the 19th century, there was lots of discussion about children and their nature and their potential. And you had a couple of competing views. Jean-Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher, believed that children were born innocent or born as blank slates, the tabula rasa, whether they were innocent flowers to be grown and nurtured and watered and aided, or whether they were blank slates upon which values could be implanted and embedded. improved with proper guidance. That was one view. And who could do that? Teachers could contribute to that. Schools could contribute to that. There's another view of children, sort of fundamentalist Christian view, that they were born with original sin. And the challenge was to ensure that their potentially animalistic behavior did not overwhelm their moral character.

and the school's job was to contain the negative side of a child's nature. And so that required discipline, and that required even repression. And, you know, you might even need to beat the bad parts out of the child. Spare the rod and spoil the child. That notion arises in that time. So corporal punishment was used. But all of these things are notwithstanding the differences in their purpose, perceptions of children are leading to an argument that schooling matters and schooling on a broad

scale matters. Humboldt's template for a system of public education continues to be adapted around the world. I want to go back a bit in time, back to when Humboldt first constructed this system, to discuss another of his crowning achievements, our modern university. Universities had been around for centuries, but this was a radical rethink, and it was born at the brand new University of Berlin, founded by Humboldt in 1810. I believe that I can rightly claim that the teaching system in this state has received new impetus for me. And although I have only been in office for a year, many signs of my

administrative work will remain. Something which affects me personally, more directly than anything else, is the establishment of a new university here in Berlin. Humboldt said his new university would be, quote, the mother of all modern universities. It was based on Humboldt's philosophy of education, the importance of an all-around education and academic freedom in order to conduct critical research that would discover new truths. It originally had four areas of study, philosophy, medicine, law, and theology. Philip von Tirk. So the way that these things got reflected in the university was that he put an emphasis

or he saw the role of the university as a place to acquire a new. knowledge. That meant research. And an important part of this concept was that it had to be free. It should enable professors together with their students, you know, working shoulder to shoulder, to pursue things that were of interest to them. Academic freedom, very important concept. People could follow up their interests, and this led to great breakthroughs in all fields. You know, we think of the university as a research institution, developing all sorts of new knowledge. We think perhaps of, you know, medicine where they had one breakthrough after the other, coming up with new vaccines and anatomy and all kinds of stuff, but also physics,

chemistry, the natural sciences. Geology was a big deal. Without geology, which got people used to the notion of deep time, Darwin would not have been possible because deep time. Deep is a very important concept in the notion of evolution, but also in various scholarly subjects, languages, linguistics, biblical studies. People began to look at the Bible in a new way, and all of these things had enormous ramifications. The aunt of Ralph Woldo Emerson got very worried when his older brother wanted to go to Germany to study theology because she was a afraid he would lose his faith because of all of this new work that was going on in terms of theology and religion and you know biblical studies so across the board people were

doing all of these new stuff and it led to armies of people Americans you know going over there in order to to be like a first-rate doctor or first-rate theologian or first-rate scholar of any sort you would go to Germany and spend time there you learn a language you know you sit in on the lectures of the great professors and by the way You know, we haven't even talked about the great philosophers. Kant, Fichter, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. Who were the great French philosophers of that time? How many can you think of?

Yes, there were some English philosophers in the 18th century, but in the 19th century, the center of the intellectual world, that was Germany. And why was that? It was because of this incredible university system that had been set up, up, you know, first modeled at University of Berlin, but then, you know, it caught on. The first institution in the United States that very deliberately took this on was Johns Hopkins, you know, and they, among other things, set up a medical faculty, sort of modeled on the German medical faculty. So people did a lot of research at Johns Hopkins. So what is the degree

that you get for research? It's called a PhD, right? So there was basically this new degree that was invented for the new university, the new graduate school. And by the way, once you start people doing research, you have to publish it. So guess what? You have to set up a university printing press. So Johns Hopkins was the first university to have a printing press. You know, this was eventually picked up by all the leading universities in this country. So there was an enormous continuing impact, not free from controversy, of course. Some people would would now, would say, well, you know, if you get too focused on research, maybe that narrows you and so on.

But nonetheless, it was an incredible development in education in the world at the college and university level. So Humboldt's model for the modern university is being adopted around the world. Well, bits and pieces of it are. Imitated at least, but mainly selectively in other countries. Mitchell Ash is Professor Emeritus of Modern History. at the University of Vienna in Austria. It's a mistake to believe that they simply took the German approach

and pasted it onto their own systems. It didn't quite work that way. Each country adopted the basic principles and then adopted them and then adapted them to their own circumstances. And that's true, especially true in the United States. American Research University was created by pulling together the German approach with the American and British Bachelor, which is based on general education at first,

and other things to create a kind of hybrid. That's this hybridity, this mix of approaches, is the secret of the sex-sex of the American system along with the fact that no one believes that the state should finance it all. You could have civil society founding universities, Catholic universities, city universities, state universities, private universities.

This variety of possible universities is this secretive success of the American system. And that's not Humboldt. Humboldt would not have, understood how that worked, although he might have approved it. He certainly would not have thought that it would be possible in Germany. And most Germans still don't think it's the right way to go. In 1949, the University of Berlin's name was changed in recognition of Wilhelm van Humboldt's tremendous contribution to education. It's now called the Humboldt University of Berlin. Today,

Humboldt is a very much revered figure in Germany. But during his lifetime, his educational ideals came under fierce attack. We'll talk about that next. You're listening to Part 2 of Humboldt's Ghost on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on U.S. Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at CBC Radio. c.ca slash ideas. You can also hear ideas on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your

podcast. I'm Nala Ayed. You know what I love about TIF? I get to find out if new movies live up to their hype before most people even get to see a trailer. And I can tell you, if Bob Odenkirk nails his role as a small town sheriff in the movie normal, and on cue, I actually get to talk to him about it. Bob's just one of the stars coming through town for the Toronto International Film Festival. Follow Q with Tom Power. That's me, wherever you get your podcasts, and I'll make sure you keep up. In 1809, Wilhelm von Humboldt developed a model for the delivery of public education that was later adopted around the world. His other great achievement was modernizing the university system. We return to part two of Carl Turner's documentary series Humboldt's Ghost.

While Canada and the United States were busy putting their spin on Humboldt's vision for higher education, in Prussia, his vision is coming under attack. Philip Funturk. There was a reaction that began to set in, went pretty far along by 1819, the Karlsbott Decree, and the old reactionary aristocrats were beginning to resume power. In 1819, German dramatist and writer August Friedrich Ferdinand von Katsubu mocked the liberal ideals that were growing in popularity amongst the university students. Because of this, Karl Ludwif Sand, a theologian student, was enraged and plotted to kill him.

The murder shocked the Prussian aristocracy who feared for the survival of the monarchy. A conference was called in the town of Carlsbad that led to a set of reactionary decrees that cracked down on the press, liberal reforms, and student activism. This crackdown was not only at the university level, but at all levels of Humboldt's public education system. And to some extent, the people who motivated, say, the primary school system had their wings clipped.

And so the focus maybe was not so much on the object is to create the full human being untrammeled by the dictates of society, and government and so on. That sort of began to lose its drive. And instead, you know, the notion became more, oh, the schools are to train people to serve their country. You know, a very different focus.

You may not see it when you look at a school and you may have to sort of appreciate what happened before. But so that primary education is a mandatory thing with all of these developments, you know, the inspection of the schools, professional training of teachers, all of these things. That stayed, but maybe not quite with the same spirit. Although, interestingly, what began to happen was that a lot of the teachers, some of them are very smart guys, tended to get involved with the revolutionary forces

that were sort of brewing in Germany and the rest of Europe in the 1840s. And they would get into trouble because of that, and they were forced out, and some of them emigrated to this country. the United States and other places. So there was an enormous tension. So it continued, the primary schooling and so on, but maybe with a sort of a different emphasis. The educational system at the university level,

that continued to thrive as well. You know, people would have to kind of watch what they said to some extent. You know, there were censors. There were limits to academic freedom. And then the high school, the Ghanasium, as it is called, in Germany. I mean, you might just say a word about that. Why gymnasium?

English, it sounds like gymnasium. Why is that? I mean, well, it goes back to the Greek. And gymnasium, gymnasion in Greek, comes from the word gimnos, which means naked. And this comes from the fact that Greek athletes were naked when they did their sports. You ran the 100-yard sprint in your birthday soon. and, you know, sort of heavily oiled with olive oil and whatnot.

And then, you know, between the sprints and the shot pudding and the disc is throwing, all the kind of stuff, you would have intellectual conversations, you know, do a little sport, and then you have your education going on at the same time. And so the schools in many countries adopted this part of the gymnasium tradition, the intellectual part. In the English-speaking world, what was picked up in the notion gymnasium was the athletic, part. But the gymnasium was perhaps less subject to attack than some of the other

institutions. Because in practice, I mean, there were ideals. This is for everybody. The carpenter should go to get this full education. Nothing wrong with having tradespeople learn Greek. There was a sort of idealistic aspect about this. Not

especially practical. And the fact of the matter is that the gymnasium was an elite institution. and, you know, even into fairly recently, to complete a gymnasium education. What we would call a high school education. You know, and I'm talking about the generation of my father and our own generation. You know, you did your final exam and a gymnasium. You were somebody.

And that was a very small percentage of the population. And then it gave you the right to go to university. But it was an elite institution. and, you know, elites kind of appeal to reactionary aristocrats. So a lot of these things continued, but the impetus, the original fire that motivated this stuff, you know, may have been lost, you know, and people have to defend what education is about.

That original fire, Bill Dung, going to school to fulfill your inner potential, to learn how to learn, and learn how to judge the world around you with insight and knowledge. That was what education was about for Humboldt. But as we see with the Carlsbad decrees, Bill Dung is downright dangerous, especially if you are an aristocrat committed to the status quo. But the days left of real power were numbered for the royal courts of Europe. And by the middle of the 19th century, the urgent driver of conformity was economic.

the Industrial Revolution. Even in Germany, whatever Humbold might have thought, it very quickly became a training ground for the industrial state. Gabor Matei is an acclaimed Canadian author and physician. He's also a former high school English teacher. He says the impact of rapid industrialization that started in the 1830s transformed the purpose of education in Prussia. today's modern Germany.

Prussia was feeling the pressure of falling behind other countries. In Germany, he was trying to catch up with the British Empire in terms of industrialization, science, technology, and military, and I think the schools became very quickly a template for training people for industrialized capitalism. This meant profound changes to the Humboltian ideals of education. It's in the nature of any system, socioeconomic, political system, to co-opt every one of its sub-institutions

to its larger purposes. So the average teacher goes into education, at least in part, because they just want to help educate kids, which is a sacred task. The average physician goes into medicine in addition to whatever personal motives that I might have, like myself,

including wanting to make a good living, but also because I want to serve humanity and I want to help people. but the system has a way of co-opting everything now it's not an interest of an industrialized mechanized technologized uniformity-seeking capitalist and real system to have people who are spontaneous

who are in touch with their emotions and will not do things they don't want to do people who know how to think independently there's room for that in some narrow areas but by and large what the system wants and I'm not talking about a conspiracy here any system is self-organizing it'll create the sub-institutions

that'll serve its larger ideological and economic interest so the schools have been suborned into promoting an industrialized model which actually is what happened in Germany in the 19th century, whatever Humboldt's original vision may have been, it was very quickly cooperated into the needs of the expanding militaristic, industrial, capitalist, imperial, Prussian state apparatus.

So what happened to Humboldt's core tenant of education? Bill Dung. The visualization of one's inner potential, self-cultivation, the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, the belief that the goal, The goal of education is to nurture this in all of us. Philip von Turk. It is the great tragedy of Germany that Humboldt's, all the stuff that he did didn't,

you know, was not allowed to thrive. And we look, we don't even look back to the early 19th century because we are fixated on the 20th century. We look at all the terrible things that happened in Germany in the 20th century. all that sort of eclipses. What happened in the early 19th century in Germany, in Prussia, when that was really the leading light in Europe. And by the way, one of the things that can be discussed here is the enormous impact that this had on the French, on the English, and the Americans. You know, there were armies of Americans who went over to Prussia to study what

what was going on there. So I think, you know, this is a worthwhile project that you're doing. That is to shine a light on what education was meant to be, at least according to the creator of the world's first public education system and modern university, a visionary and revolutionary thinker. But what of Wilhelm von Humboldt's legacy today? Mitchell Ash. So Humboldt's legacy is,

now, I think it's fair to say, is the legacy of a symbol. He is taken to be a symbol for research for its own sake, first of all. The idea that research doesn't have to be immediately useful to be valuable, he didn't invent that idea, but he did believe that higher education should be based on that idea. And anyone who still believes that certainly can think of Humbold as a symbol of their views, and he would have agreed with that. The idea is that learning should have building, should happen through building through self-cultivation. The Germans call it research-based learning. Faustendus Leinen has pretty much been defeated by the institution of mass higher education, but probably never would have thought that 30 to 50% of an age group was

going to be in a position to carry out his ideals, simply because they wouldn't be intellectually prepared for it. And he was right. In his day, at most, 1% or 2% of an age group went to university. So now we have a completely different universe. So Humbot now, at that level, is a symbol of what had to die in order to make mass higher education succeed. I'm putting that very bitterly because I'm a believer in liberal arts education and I still think it's possible. But unfortunately, it only works in small college settings really well. It works in some parts of universities as well where you can create niches to make it work with seminar-based instruction and so on. But for genuine mass higher education, Humbold's approach is probably not well suited.

And there's a tremendous irony there, in Germany at least, that Humbold's name got revived and became, had acquired almost cult status precisely in the 60s and 70s when the mass higher education was finally being instituted in the German system. And it was simply dysfunctional from the get-go. So we now have the so-called Bologna process. In 1999, the Bologna Accord linked universities across Europe by standardizing their program. where you have really concentrated, specialized bachelor degrees and general education is unknown,

unless you take a degree in general studies. And Humboldt would have been shocked by that. And the question is, is there still a place for Humboldt's ideals? Yeah, well, the irony that I just tried to describe is that his name is still very present in higher education discourse because his ideals, utopian as they were, are still deeply attractive. to people and the idea that Humboldt for everyone is an idea that we should strive for

is still very attractive even if it's simply impossible to imagine it's actually being realized the most gifted students in an age cohort can actually make it work even today because they choose for themselves what courses they're going to take and they do well and all of them and there are such people and they're the one percent of Humboldt's day and they're still around so the system makes it possible for them to do that and that's good but the idea of structuring the entire university around that system led to students taking seven years to do their first degree and the state simply said we can't afford that

and the parents said we can't afford that so bologna was introduced which is based on nothing more than the British bachelor a six semester one one discipline bachelor degree it's been modified it can do better than that now in Germany and you can study more than one subject but it's still very highly specialized and not very research-based. And the whole idea of having a bachelor is not an import from the United States.

That's simply a legend that was invented by people who wanted to stop this whole thing. That has nothing to do with Humboldt. But they continued to evoke his name and in Sunday speeches, so to speak, by university presidents and rectors because the ideal is still admirable. And also because there is no alternative,

apparently, on the horizon that will actually inspire people the way Humboldt's ideas can still inspire people. Sort of a neoliberal, commercial, practical knowledge-based, get-a-job education doesn't inspire people. Maybe it's what they think they have to have, but it doesn't inspire them to become better human beings the way the Humboldt idea could.

If, like me, you felt there was something missing from your education, something there in the shadows, You're right. It's Humboldt's ghost, refusing to leave, haunting the hallways with murmurings about what education was meant to be. It's funny.

A gentleman named Jürgen Rutgers, who was Minister of Education and Research in Germany in the 1990s, and then became Prime Minister of North Romancephalia, Germany's largest, most populous state, proclaimed famously twice that Humboldt was dead. he said it may sound paradoxical but we must reinvent the Humboldian university in order to preserve it

it's funny how some sophisticated German politicians have figured out how to make even the death of Humbold into a successful policy slogan they don't mean it badly or negatively they mean it has to be modernized and maybe they will someday succeed but what we now have is kind of a zombie Humboldt that's why I wrote titled my piece Humboldt the undead the idea a kind of a fractured idea of Humboldt, I call it Humboldt in quotes, is now circulating through the German system without actually being able to survive, except in certain niche locations. In the American system, the name of Humboldov, as you said, is simply unknown if you're not an expert. But the idea that liberal arts is entering us, this position, is getting into the position where

general education in the true sense of the term is only going to be possible in small colleges and niche locations, is already there. And that's simply because it wasn't about being useful. It wasn't about making money. It was about cultivating one's own personality and one's own intellect in the service of improving society. And that idea was simply now laughed at in today's neoliberal universe. Thadus isn't determined by that sort of thing anymore.

And the irony there, of course, is that the allies, the allies of the neoliberal revolution transfer of power, so to speak, in higher education, the most loyal allies are, in fact, the parents of the students, and in many cases the students themselves, because they want to see a return on their investment. Higher education costs so much money. They can be forgiven, it seems to me, for wanting to know whether their children are going to have the chance to make it back,

that money, pay that money back someday. And so the highfalutin ideals simply take second or third or tenth place in comparison with the drive to get enough to make it work. It's dangerous to pull a figure from their historical context. We're all a product of our time and we should be judged accordingly. But it's so tempting to do this with Humboldt. So let's flip this around. What if we pulled him from the year 1809 and let him walk around the 21st century? What would Wilhelm von Humboldt think of us? Mitchell Ash. I don't really, I can't pretend to know.

I think he would find it all very strange because the whole idea of mass higher education or even mass public education was simply strange to anyone in his day. He would have had to, first of all, just get his mind around the idea that that actually happened and that it became possible to do. That meant, ironically, that the, shall we say, the modernization approach of his bosses who did the Prussian state reforms actually paid off in the long run by making, creating the conditions for a dynamic

economy that ultimately produced the wealth that made it possible to pay for this, all of this. And the question of whether that money is still there or whether it's going other places is, of course, a political question that he would have understood perfectly well because there were debates about where to put money, where the state should put money in his day, too. there was just not something he engaged in. But otherwise, I think it would be fair to say that he would have been deeply shocked and appalled by the high level of specialization that now exists in modern education systems. And also by the simple fact that in order to make that kind of level of specialization work, you really have to go back to a kind of wrote memory approach to learning to get the basics at least down. And so research-based approach to the basic courses in a subject to simply out of the question, it's for back to memorization, or at least to learning out of a textbook and mastering the basics by memory.

He wouldn't have liked that at all. But he might, being brilliant as he was, he might have understood why it happened. And what would be Humboldt's reaction to what is happening on campuses right now? In particular, the crackdown on freedom of expression. That was not his vision for the modern university. One of Humbold's key ideals

was the freedom of teaching and research, teaching and learning, actually. In Humboldt's university, that is to say, in the Prussian universities of the early 19th century, students also had freedom. It wasn't just the professors who had the freedom to teach what they wished. The students could decide what courses to take. There were no fixed curricula. Now, we have to remember, as I've said, that it was only one or two percent of the age group, so they could use this freedom and not just become despairing because they had no orientation.

most of them were in a position to actually be able to use that freedom productively. With today's fixed curriculum, the freedom of learning is pretty much gone. Your choice is basically which required courses do you choose to take in order to be able to get to the next courses? The Bologna system in Europe has instituted that quite effectively, unfortunately. So we could say that that level of freedom is gone, at least at the first level of the bachelor degree, accepted certain institutions, elite institutions that can afford to give students the freedom that they used to have under Humbull.

But we have to remember that what has gone by the wayside and that's one thing that has gone by the wayside. But the freedom of academic freedom in the classical sense of a professor being able to decide what to teach according to her or his own lights is in danger today, from two sides. It's from, first of all, from the dictators, authoritarian rulers.

This is a well-known danger, but also from those who believe that they know exactly what is wrong with the old colonial ideals and the old white men and their ideas, and they know exactly how to replace them with three or four philosophers who they think have really discovered the key to modern wisdom. That's also a danger to academic freedom. and that's where I think this idea of safe space needs to be reformed. It's not just a place where students who think of themselves as coming from fresh groups can talk with each other. That's needed, of course. But we also need a concept of a safe space where students can speak with each other about anything

without feeling as though they're going to get hit over the head by some self-certainty, either by conservatives or lefties. That's still needed, and that's not, it's not clear where that's going to be coming from unless the institution itself and its leadership makes it happen, makes it not only possible, but makes it actually happen. And today's higher education leaders

don't seem to have the self-confidence that higher education leaders used to have in this kind of thing. They feel like they're under such pressure to bring in third-party funding and to please the parents and to please their state sponsors or their local sponsors or whatever sponsors

that they kind of cave when there's a threat and somebody starts getting allowed instead of standing up for academic freedom in its true sense, and that's unfortunate. I think Humboldt would understand if someone would say academic freedom needs to be enforced by the leadership of higher education

because it won't be enforced by anyone else. Philip von Tirk. You know, sometimes people think, well, you know, we're 200 years beyond that now, so we must be better. And, you know, we're beyond that now. And I think that often that's a mistake. People lose really what a motivating spirit is behind a particular time. It's worth recovering. If you want to focus on Western history, European history, the birth of romanticism,

where people also began to think about the untrammeled development of the human self, the human being, you know, this is where you have to go. And there are lessons there that are important for our own time. But you have to learn how to listen. And you have to get an angle. and why these things matter. And I think that reflecting on Humbold and what he did is a way of recovering something very important

that happened in those early years. In 1792, long before he was tasked with reforming education, Humboldt wrote about the importance of Bill Dung. Whatever does not spring from man's free choice, or as only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but still remains alien to his true nature. He does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness. Almost like a prophecy, Humboldt wrote that the goal of education is to create independent, critical thinkers. and should we fail, he said the state would produce. Slaves, rather than a nation of free and independent men.

You were listening to the concluding episode of Humboldt's Ghost, presented by Ideas contributor Carl Turner. You can go to our website, cbc.ca.ca.com slash ideas to see additional material for this documentary. This series was produced by Ideas producer Mary Link. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Pat Martin. Web producer Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas.

And I'm Nala Ayad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.