Ideas - Public education was built on this key concept — now it's gone

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

Two hundred years ago, Wilhelm von Humboldt created the education system as we know it today. At the heart of his philosophy of education was the concept of Bildung — reaching one's inner potential. Yet over the years, as his public education system was adopted, Bildung may well have been the critical piece left out. *This episode is part one of two-part series. It originally aired on April 15, 2024.

Why do bad mothers make for such compelling stories? According to the writer Emma Knight, the messiness of motherhood is exactly what makes it interesting. And we talked all about that on my podcast bookends. Every week on the show, I sit down for honest conversations with today's literary stars. We cover a lot of different ground about their lives, their inspirations, their writing, and of course, also we talk about their mothers. If you have a mom good or bad, you should check out bookends with their writing. Matea Roach, wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. October 14th, 1806. On a plateau in Prussia, now modern-day Germany. Two armies, 320,000 soldiers. collide in the twin battles of Jena and Ayrstadt. There were quite a large number of men involved, and thousands died. On one side, Napoleon, emperor of France.

On the other, the Prussian forces of King Friedrich Wilhelm III, who'd started the war. You know, you can just imagine, you're at a battle. You see people falling to the left and right of you in armies and panic and retreat, And you may have gone into the battle thinking, okay, you know, we're not, we'll show the French. And instead, you are just wiped off the slate. A pivotal victory for Napoleon.

It more or less sealed the deal with respect to which power was going to be the greatest in Europe for the next few years. But it also sealed the deal in the sense that it made it possible for Napoleon to acquire a large amount of Prussia's territory, Prussia being the largest of the German states. So, Prussia ceded half its territory. half its population. Can you imagine? It's like saying to us in the United States, well, all the states west of the Mississippi now belonged to Russia. It was extraordinary. The Battle of Vienna and the Twin Battle of Amershet were a real dividing point and ushered in a whole new era in Prussian life.

At the time of the twin battles, a mid-ranked aristocrat by the name of Wilhelm von Humbold, is the Prussian ambassador to the Vatican in Rome. With his country in shatters, Humboldt is called back to Berlin and is demoted to a lowly position within the Ministry of the Interior. A job he holds for only 18 months. Yet, in that time, Humboldt creates the public education system. Everything from primary grade school all the way to the modern research university. So it was really under Humboldt that the notion of universal mandatory education was implemented.

It was a radical idea. And the mortar to bind this elaborate system together? Building, a complex concept, hard to translate from German. But it's central to Humboldt's philosophy of education. In the first of this two-part series on the state of our public education, system, ideas contributor and economic historian Carl Turner looks at the remarkable life of its creator, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and the meaning and importance of Bildung. You've probably never heard of Wilhelm von Humboldt. I know I certainly didn't. So how did a

mid-level bureaucrat sandwiched between thick layers of bureaucracy in a country crushed by conflict and then squeezed by empires managed to change the world. Seriously, who is this guy? It's not easy to find people knowledgeable about Humboldt in the English-speaking world, even among educational scholars. When I told Ellen Loggeman,

retired dean of the Harvard School of Education, that I was doing a piece on Humboldt, she said, you need to talk to Philip. Who was Wilhelm von Humboldt? He was a scholar, he was a man of letters, he was a statesman, and he was an educational reform. Philip is Philip von Turk, the former managing director of the legal department at J.P. Morgan Chase in New York.

Most people, after a career like that, kick up their feet and retire. Von Turk, on the other hand, went back to school, something that could be described as Humboldian, fitting as he is fascinated by the life and work of Wilhelm von Humboldt. He articulated ideals that would resonate for a long time until today. He was of a aristocratic background. His grandfather had been raised to the nobility. And his parents were very interested in education. They did not stink on it.

They had a number of house tutors that raised Wilhelm and his brother, Alexander. And they had an incredible education at home. The tutors were well-known personalities themselves. The boys were precocious. They learned how to speak various languages by the time they were. were 13. By the time they were 18, they were hobnaving essentially in Berlin, meeting the intellectuals at the time. It's very difficult to talk about Milham von Hempelts without also mentioning his brother,

Alexander, who was one of the great explorers of his time from the 19th century. Mitchell Ash, Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the University of Vienna in Austria, The two of them were both born in a small castle in a park called Tegel Park, which is now part of the city of Berlin, but was far outside of the city at the time. It was clear that they were both gifted very soon, and then they studied in different places. Wilhelm studied at the University of Göttingen for a few semesters.

Didn't finish, but he didn't have to. In those days, Alexander went to the Mining Academy and became mining engineer and actually did finish his degree in Feiberg and Saxony. During the time of his studies, Alexander, it became clear to him that he was going to explore the world and expand human knowledge from every possible perspective, which he then went on to do and lived to be 90 years old, so he was at it for a long time. Wilhelm was more gifted in the field of languages and humanistic learning, but he also studied philosophy, in particular political philosophy, and wrote a paper very early on the limits of Republican education. Around this time, Philip Bunturk says an important person comes into Humboldt's life. He would meet a woman called Carolina von Desjardin,

from an old Prussian aristocratic family. In 1791, they got married. And she was quite a woman in her own right. Today, we would talk about her as a liberated woman. She organized salons in Paris, Rome, Vienna, and Berlin. She lived apart from her husband for years at a time. They had what we would now call today an open marriage. Can I just, I just, I, when you said open marriage,

are you quite, like in the modern sense of the term, like open marriage? Like they were seeing other people and... Yes, these folks were quite liberal-minded in that. that sense. She had some well-known dalliances with various people, and we know their names, as did he also, you know, recorded in his journal. And that seemed to work for them. And a related theme is that there was a real affinity between the Humboats and a group of people in Yena at the university there, who were also, you know, into open marriages and a little bit like what we think of Bloomsbury in London, except more so.

So there was like a segment of society that was liberated, progressive, the women played in a very important role. And one of these people from Yenna, who, you know, again, the same group of people, the Humboldt's and so on, wrote a novel called Lucind, which was a slightly anonymized account of love affairs, highly erotic, shocking to the people at the time. But that was part of the milieu. You know, we don't think of Humboldt, you know, as a... as a rake or anything and I think in his appearance he's very conventional

but there was a lot of stuff going on and it had to do in a certain sense with the notion of build on which is to say developing to your fullest extent all of your capacities that could be sexual sometimes it would be important for that

to have different partners all of this you know sort of fed into this whole stream of buildil Bill done There's that word again. But more on that in a bit. A key question now is how Humbold was even able to create a universal system of education. Bits of it were already in place, but they weren't public or standardized, nor were they linked from primary all the way through to university.

He also created a template for the modern university. To understand how he was able to pull off such a transformative achievement, we first have to understand Prussia, the country he was born in. into in 1767. Let's begin a few decades before his birth. Prussia in the early 18th century was a small place. It was beleaguered. It was surrounded by powerful enemies. Everybody was worried about the French. And then there were the hopsburgs, you know, to the south and the Russians and all of these very powerful countries. And so little Prussia was always in danger of being overrun. And they had one king who sized up the situation towards the beginning of the 18th century.

His name was Frederick William I, the First, the soldier king, as he was called. And he concluded that the way to survive was to have a really powerful army. And that's what he did. He introduced a very frugal government. so that there would be funds for the raising of this army. And, you know, he went to great lengths. He had this one regiment of soldiers that were selected for their height. And you had to be taller than six feet five or something in order to join this regiment.

And the purpose of it was this would be the regiment that you would see if you, you know, came over to Berlin and you wanted to, or Potsdam, and you wanted to review the troops. You would see this army of giants. that would create an impression on people, including one of the Russian czars who said that rather than being the czar, the thing that he always wanted most to be was a general in the Prussian army. What a strange concept. But anyway, so that was the soldier king, and he had a son, Frederick the Great, as we call them, as, by the way, Voltaire called them initially. Friedrich Le Grand. And Voltaire, a great French intellectual, actually stayed with Frederick the Great

for quite some time in Frederick's palace called Sanssoucille, which in English we would, I guess, translate nowadays using sort of a modern jargon, no worries. And this was like a retreat for culture and, you know, French things. Frederick the Great Arm, his French was better than his German. French culture was important. Voltaire, who has the ear of the king, believes in free expression and reason above all else.

And these ideas start circulating in Prussia, at least among the elites. So here is Frederick the Great. He inherits this incredible army. He starts wars. He fights three major wars. Doubles the territory of Prussia. He would be classified as one of the so-called enlightened despots.

I mean, he was a smart guy. And very shrewd and very hard-working. Eventually, he would be succeeded by Frederick William III. His wife, by the way, Louise is a very important person also in her own right and was key in fostering a liberal court, liberal in terms of forward-looking progressive people. Frederick William III was also an absolute monarch, but he didn't have the talents. And the result was that there was a gap in the leadership. By the turn of the 19th century, both Wilhelm and his brother Alexander are making names for themselves in entirely different domains.

You could say they benefited from their wealth and positions. They are aristocrats, after all, but mid-level aristocrats. And within a royal court obsessed with hierarchy that was often a limiting distinction. What makes them stand out is a mixture of intelligence, talent, and ambition. Alexander is science-minded. He loves geology and goes on to become a renowned explorer and natural philosopher. One of his fans, a young Charles Darwin. Wilhelm, on the other hand, is interested in the arts.

Languages fascinate him. But beyond linguistic pursuits, Wilhelm is both practical and ambitious. He had studied diplomacy when he was at the university. His primary area of study was law, but he sort of minored, you might say, in diplomacy. And a job opportunity that opened up for him was to become the ambassador to the Holy See. So, at the age of 34, Humboldt secures the coveted role

of Prussian ambassador to the Vatican. And so he and Carolina went down to Rome, and he didn't really have too many official duties. You know, he didn't have to worry about the consular stuff, you know, where you deal with citizens, you lost passports and this sort of thing. So he had a lot of time. and he studied, he loved Rome.

His wife conducted a son-law. I think he was having a great time, both him and his wife. After the war, for three years, Humboldt ignores requests to return to Berlin. The factor that finally forces him back is the fear of losing his wife's estate to the French. In fact, the night he arrives, he finds a French lieutenant colonel snoring in his bed.

At this point, Humboldt has lived. little choice but to remain in Prussia. But Berlin is not the same city. The king and his family, fearing for their lives, have fled to Kunigsberg, a port city on the Baltic coast. The royal court followed him. This would be the more conservative and upper-level aristocrats. Berlin falls into a political vacuum. Prussia, now a client state of France is forced to pay huge reparations. The country is broken and needs to be reborn if it is to raise this money. This gives birth to the Prussian reform movement led by Karl Freya von Stein, who we mentioned earlier, and Carl August von Hardenberg. They stay in Berlin, and while they still answer to the king of Prussia, they are

immensely influential. Mitchell Ash. Stein and Hardenberg had convinced the king that the only way to recover from this terribly weak position that Prussia was in was to reform practically every aspect of state administration. It meant a wide range of things. For example, initiating or instituting the freedom of occupational choice, which had not existed yet in Prussia until this time. That was supposed to be able to free the peasants and others to be able to move around without having to constantly register with their hometowns before they went anywhere and to choose the occupation that suited them best. That was one aspect. a very important aspect of the Prussian reforms at this time.

The idea, of course, was that this would kickstart the economy and increase revenues so that they could pay the huge reparations fees that Napoleon had charged them in order to fray the cost of his own wars, but also to put the Prussian state itself on a better economic footing than it had been before. High on the reform movement's list of priorities is education, a topic that was near and dear to the king's father.

Well, already under Frederick II, the great king of the middle 18th century, we had what was called an enlightened despotism regime. Frederick wanted complete control of policy, but he also understood that education was important for the success of a modern state. So he began to initiate moves to improve education, but it didn't get us very far. The idea of having at least a population that is at least partly literate was an enlightenment idea that went back already for. decades. But actually enacting it was not necessarily something that conservative regimes wanted to see happen. It was only under the pressure of the Steinhardenberg reforms that this idea got expanded to a complete reform of the whole system. When Humboldt arrives in Berlin, everything has been flipped on its head. Radical ideas that have been discussed in salons for years are suddenly on the

table. It's an exciting time for an ambitious thinker such as Humboldt, who was expected. a plumb position, Philip von Tirk. So he wrote to Freire Fumstein, Baron Fomstein, who was like the principal political figure at the time in Berlin, very progressive guy. And I was looking for a job, something where he would report directly to the king and it didn't work out right away. And ultimately he was given a position to head up the section

on ecclesiastical and educational affairs, which was, I guess, somewhat disappointed. somewhat disappointing for him because he thought he was, you know, it would get a bigger job. So he's not particularly excited about this. No, he had never been a bureaucrat. Mitchell Ash. And he understood that fighting things out over policy

was not exactly something he wanted to do. It was certainly a lot less fun than engaging in cultivated conversation and learned a discourse with people in Rome. To his wife, Carolina, still living in Rome with his children, he writes, Managing a crowd of scholars is not much better than having a troop of traveling actors in one's charge. Humboldt pushes back on the offer. He cautiously reaches out to the Queen's brother.

He lets it be known that he wants to go back to Rome. When that doesn't work, he writes to the king. He pleads his unsuitability for the position. It's so great that accepting this job would be akin to criminal frivolity. He is desperate to keep his job. as ambassador. The thing which above all frightens me is to leave a secure and agreeable position

in order to embark upon a career in which my chances of success are very doubtful. And while Humbold doesn't want the job, he's perfect for it. Education is crucial to attain Bill Dung, something he's been mulling over for years. Let's take a moment to try and explain Bill Dung, this complex term whose meaning is still debated

to this day. Bill Dung, the word, first appears around the late 13th century when the Bible is translated from Latin into German. It's rooted in an ancient mystical tradition where build means picture or image. The idea is a person carries in their soul the image of God that they use to build up those ideals within themselves. Bill Dung's meaning stays this way for the next 500 years. By the late 18th century, German poets and philosophers begin to reshape it. Humboldt, the linguist, joins the debate. For him, the meaning of Bill Dung, is non-secular. No longer is it about the image of God. Instead, Bill Dung becomes the ability to both see and manifest your own potential. The closest we get to Humboldt's interpretation is an essay he wrote in 1793. Here's a

translated excerpt from Theory of Bill Dung. 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 augments 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. Humboldt folds Bill Dung into his philosophy of education.

Today, Bil Dung is often synonymous with education, but it has a much deeper meaning. Bill Deng, I mean, it's one of those words that is very difficult to translate into English and there's no real equivalent. Philip von Tirk. The purpose of Bildung 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. So one way to look at this in terms of the purpose of education, one could say with Rousseau, the world is bad. The purpose of education is to teach a person, to develop his full capacities free of all constraints,

you know, that might be introduced by commercial interests, by vocations, by the demands of the state, you know, the state wants people to become obedient and imbibe a certain doctrine and dogma and whatnot. All of that had to be put aside. 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 his time and to make it better. almost like a subversive undertone to building, right? I mean, it focuses on the person and full

development in all capacities to the fullest extent of that person. And it's a very powerful concept. Once you begin to think of, you know, the full potential of human beings, of human beings having enormous potential. And you begin to think about how to develop that in a maximalist way, you begin to get to the concept of building. So it's a very powerful concept, and particularly with Humboldt, it embodies a certain view of the Greeks. For people like Humboldt, but also the other people of his time, the Greeks represented a high point in civilization.

Here were people who develop their fullest capacities as a society, whether it's poetry, it's tragedy, comedy, philosophy, history, all of these things, right? The Greeks did for the first time and did it better than anybody else if you got into it. The Greeks were very important because they had their own notion, by the way, of building. In Greek, the word is Padaya. You know, you can see their root, they're PED, you know, children. And this was also a powerful stream that was fostered by Humboldt. And the German word for this is Neo-Humanismus. You know, there was a whole humanistic turn in the 16th century. You know, we think of people like

Erasmus, you know, going back to the Greeks, the Reformation as well, you know, the translation in the New Testament from the original Greek into German, but it was helpful if you knew the Greek and people encouraged the study of Greek in those days. The Greeks were highly important, and they infuse this notion of building. For Humboldt, a better world starts with the individual. How? Through Bildung. By maximizing one's inner potential, you create a society made of self-aware, independent, critical thinkers. Building was being enacted in Humbold's concept.

At least that was the idea that it should happen. Mitchell Ash. 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. That doesn't mean you actually have to become a professor, but you have to have, 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. Humbold actually did say in a letter to the king that this would produce better civil servants even because they weren't just robots carrying out the decrees of a king but they had the capability of understanding the principles behind the policies and therefore be able to enact them more effectively. So we're not talking about some airy, fairy, wild kind of utopian idea, although it was utopian at the time, Humboldt really believed that you could make this into practice and improve the state that way. So building was not just something that people do for their own amusement, is the point. It's about improving the

intellectual capabilities of at least a segment of the population. So how do you build a system of education that does that? This is Humboldt's challenge. You're listening to Part 1 of 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.ca.ca. slash ideas. You can also hear ideas on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyed. There are two kinds of Canadians, those who feel something when they hear this music.

And those who've been missing out so far, I'm Chris Howden. And I'm Neil Kuksal. We are the co-hosts of As It Happens, and every day we speak with people at the center of the day's most hard-hitting, heartbreaking, and sometimes hilarious news stories. Also, we have puns. Here Why As It Happens is one of Canada's longest running in most beloved shows. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. In the early 1800s, a mid-level Prussian aristocrat, Wilhelm von Humboldt, creates the post. public education system, linking three stages of learning, elementary education, secondary education, and the modern research university. And yet, most of us have probably never heard of Humboldt, let alone how he managed to create this elaborate system in only 18 months. Here's ideas contributor Carl Turner to explain this feat.

What Humbold pulled off was extraordinary. He stepped into a position he didn't want. He's pulled back to Berlin in 1809. At a period when his country is in shambles, and what does he do? Within a very short period of time, 18 months only, he just radically reformed the whole system. The whole thing. You and I went to school, some of us for a long time,

because of what he dreamt up. There are bits and pieces of elementary education available when Humboldt takes a job, but it's not widespread or extensively used. And a lot of these elementary schools are run by retired army personnel. In fact, today, wearing a military-style uniform to school comes from that tradition. Mitchell Ash.

In Prussia, in those days, it wasn't always retired soldiers. It could also be pastors or deacons of the local church who were in this position. but they all agreed on one thing, spare the rod and spoil the child. It was a very physical approach to learning, shall we say. There's a loud-voiced person in the front who's telling people what to learn and calling on them one at a time and they had better have already learned what they were supposed to learn for that day

or they were going to get hit. Humbo didn't think that was a very effective way to teach. He himself had never been in an elementary school, so we can't say that he experienced spare their rod and spoil the child approach, but he understood, I think, intuitively that this was not going to be very productive, certainly not in the sense of increasing human freedom. Humboldt's ambition is to create a more thoughtful

and comprehensive approach to teaching. He believed that first, everyone needed a general education, one that would produce independent critical thinkers. At that point, once you have the critical faculties, you can specialize. He takes notes of the ideas, debates, and educational experiments taking place around him, and he begins to fuse them with his own thoughts about education. Let's take a look at some of the thinkers and ideas Humboldt drew upon.

So, yes, there was a rich field of ideas from which Humboldt could draw. Humboldt had his own ideas as well. So he mixed his own ideas with those that were already out there. In particular, and most importantly, those of Friedrich Daniel Schleyer-Macher. A contemporary of Humboldt is a German reformed theologian, philosopher and biblical scholar. I might surprise people to know that a philosopher of religion, like him, Friedrich Daniel Schlejemacher,

who was actually a pastor at this time, but already well known as a high-level philosopher of religion, would have been one of the main idea givers, so to speak, for the reform of higher education in Germany, but he was. And in fact, much of Humboldt's concept comes from Schlajelmacher. Schlajelmacher believed he was actually interested in reforming theological education, but he thought that these ideas were of general significance. He was quite famous for his lectures, and he really thought that you could teach with the lecture

in the sense that you could not just recite a bunch of facts, purvey material like people still think lectures do, but actually develop the basic ideas of a discipline and justify them. And in doing so, in the lecture situation, you are sending the message to your students that it is that these are not ideas that are coming from God, but that are developed by human beings and need to be justified and argued for and that you students can do the same. So this is liberal arts in the best sense of the word, and Schlaimacher believed in that approach.

He, of course, did not think that anybody could just vote on the rightness of ideas like so many Americans think today, but he did think that if you have the intellectual wherewithal, you can develop ideas freely and justify them in a public forum and persuade people independently of your own status. And so that is a kind of political liberalism that he didn't actually argue for in real politics, but it was certainly believed that higher education could be reformed in this direction. If you appoint the right professors, people like himself, who believed in that ideal.

Humboldt bought into that. It's not like he was making it up entirely. Philip von Turk. I mean, he was in a tradition. Humboldt draws ideas from great thinkers both past and present, and there's another contemporary that is catching a thing. attention. He had become aware of one of the leading pedagogues of the time, a fellow called Pestolazzi, a Swiss. Johann Heinrich Pestolosi is a Swiss educational reformer who flips

elementary education on its head. Instead of the spare the rod spoil a child approach to learning, he meets children at their level. Play becomes a cornerstone in learning. And he believes the purpose of education is to develop independent thinkers. He extols active rather than passive participation in the learning experience. Pestalozzi established several schools in Switzerland. You know, people would go to his schools and they would be astounded because what he could do was that he would take kids, children, very often from underprivileged backgrounds. He was, you know, a big supporter of the poor and disadvantaged. And within the space of a very few months, these kids would be able to read and write. And by the way, because of Pesolazzi's

efforts, Switzerland became one of the first countries to wipe out a literacy. So Pestalazzi electrified people, including Hombot, who some people would refer to as a disciple of Pestalazzi. And you can see, you know, the same notions, you know, the full development of the human being in all of his capacities without regard to the demands of society. All of this, you know, sort of fed into this whole stream of building. Pestilosi's ideas on education impresses Johan Gottlieb Fishta, a Prussian philosopher. In 1807, shortly after his country's defeat to Napoleon, Fishta gives a series of lectures in Berlin discussing Pestolosi's work.

Fistolaussi lords Pestolazzi. And so who was Pestolazzi? Pestolazzi, you might say, operationalized Rousseau. You know, Rousseau's book on education was not really a handbook. I mean, it was not, you know, you couldn't sort of implement it. It was Pestolazzi who operationalized Rousseau with tremendous success. In other words, Pestalosi takes Rousseau's theory of education and sets up schools in Switzerland that reflect these ideals.

I'd like to back up a little bit. Rousseau, in the middle of the 18th century, is a seminal influence in many respects. But he is particularly important, from an educational point of view, for what he thought and wrote about education, particularly in one book called The Emile. And what is path-breaking here is a new vision of humanity. You know, we so styled himself as a historian of the human heart.

And what he asserted was that there was this awful gap between what a person is and what he or she can imagine himself or herself to be. Children are inherently good, but society corrupts him. So the job of education is to allow a child to freely develop his full multifaceted capacities in accordance with his nature. This is a very Rousseau-like characterization of what education should be about. Implicit in this is a notion of freedom. You let the child, develop freely without the constraints of society which have this effect of corrupting the natural development of the child. So this is explosive, right? Just to put this into context a little bit,

there was a very different view of children and therefore how to educate them, say, articulated by people like John Wesley, you know, the founder of Methodism. His view, and it sort of lines up with Christian doctrine, is that children are inherently wicked. They have to be disciplined. You have to break their spirits in order to educate them. You should whip them, but you should wait at least until they're one-year-old before you start whipping them. But this is the way you educate children. A very different view, right? And this hit the intellectual world, the cultural world of the time, like a ton of bricks. I'm just going to jump in right there. You said when it, when it intersects into the world at that time.

You talked about Humboldt and his wife and this sort of milieu of people. Rousseau's ideas, these whole ideas, is entering that, their society, and they're talking about it? This is being discussed. Oh, yeah. So let me give you an example.

The book is published, and it's a sensation. And there is this anecdote, and I think this is sort of emblematic. Emmanuel Kant, you know, the German philosopher, who, you know, was important then, and he will be read for the next 200 years. And he was a very regular guy. Every morning, he would get up and take his constitutional.

The housewives, in Cunexecke, which is where he taught, could set their clocks by the regularity of his walks. One day, he didn't show up, and everyone got worried. So they went to his house, and what had happened was that he had gotten a copy of the a meal the day before, the afternoon before, and he started to read it, and he couldn't put it down, and he read it through the whole night. And that's why he didn't get up. It had an enormous impact. And it's very odd because here is this guy, Kant, who very regular in his habits versus Rousseau, who intentionally did not wear, have a watch, because he thought it

was too confining. And yet these two spirits were kindred in a profound way. So here we have Rousseau creating this new vision of what a human being could be, very different from what other people thought. And it had an enormous impact. It had enormous impact on people like Kant, but also Schiller and Goethe and Humboldt. And it might say, by the way, that there was a real, you know, affinity here with the romantics. You know, romanticism is this movement that got started in Germany, you know, I would say, in the middle of the 18th century, but particularly flowering at Jena, by the way. So, in 1807, Fishta spreads the word of Pestalosi's educational achievements through a series of lectures. And in them, he argues Pestalosie's approach to education is, quote,

the only possible means of saving German independence. Moreover, he believes it can be done in a single generation. This is one of the reasons why educational reform is a priority for the reform movement. But there are no hard-fixed plans for how it should look. That's for Humble to work out. Mitchell Ash. When he gets to Berlin in 1809, it's understood that there is a need as part of the large reform program

of Stein and Hardenberg to reform educational policy from the top down or from the bottom up, take your pick, but do it finally have an educational policy in Prussia? And so his call to Berlin is part of the realization of the program that had been agreed to by the king already. He has contact with the king, but he does not actually have to argue about basics here. The lead ministers have already taken care of that. But putting together the first ever public education system is a huge endeavor. And Humboldt being humbled makes the pitch to center it around Bill Dung. In a letter to the king, he writes, There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must be of a general nature, and more importantly, a certain cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can

afford to be without. People obviously cannot be good craft workers, merchants, soldiers, or businessmen, unless regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding, and according to their condition, well-informed human beings and citizens. If this basis is laid through schooling, vocational skills are easily acquired later on, and a person is always free to move from one occupation to another as so often happens in life. Humboldt's plans are undeniably ambitious, but he's also strategic about how he implements them. Mitchell Ash. He is in a situation where he needs to orient himself within the departments of the ministry

and to make sure he gets along with the other department heads well enough that they will leave him alone, which worked at the beginning at least quite well. Then he assembled a number of experts who had already been contributing to this reformed discussion for a number of years in order to engage in conversation more fully and to learn what their ideas were and to see which of them he would take over in his own proposals. So he began fairly quickly to move towards developing a concept that would actually be realistic and not be just philosophical ideals. Although philosophical ideals were certainly involved, he was committed very clearly to producing a concept that the king would approve. Again, there are scattered pieces, but no educational system, and not linked to the state.

So what does Humboldt do? He starts by creating the first system of public education that runs. from elementary through to high school. Everything from teacher training, curricula, textbooks, and exams are to be standardized and administered by the state. It's compulsory and open to everyone. So you have a much more systematic approach to education as a whole in which you have qualifications that will take you from one step to the next,

from step one to step two, from step two to step three, qualifications which you could also use to qualify yourself for other kinds of employment if you didn't want to move on to the next step. That is, you can do elementary school until the end, and you leave, and that's possible, and it remains the predominant educational approach for the next decades. But you can also move up to the gymnasium, the university preparatory secondary school, if you are deemed qualified to do so, and that decision is made in the fourth year of your elementary school. Some think of that as being way too early, but that was, at the time,

was thought that if you were going to benefit from this very intensive gymnasium, secondary school approach, which was very high level, you would have to start early, and giftedness would have to be recognized early. So that's the second segment is the so-called gymnasium, which is not automatic, not open to everyone. It's a selective approach. In the past, people who could afford it simply bought their way in, or the parents did, I mean, and that continued for a certain period of time. But in principle, it was to be a merit-based admission to the secondary school. Your giftedness had to be attested to. by your elementary school teacher and you had to pass an oral exam or at least an interview

by the head of the gymnasium in order to be admitted. Humboldt, that was already in place in some schools. Humboldt made it more general. The next transition was from gymnasium to university. The school leaving certificate was called the obitur at the time and still is in Germany. In Holmboldt's day, just a school leaving certificate. It said you had successfully completed your examinations that were held at the end of the gymnasium after a certain number of years. examinations in all subjects taught in the school. There's a tremendous amount of examination pressure because it all happened in a week or two at the end.

What Humboldt did was to make that a universal requirement. It hadn't been required by all gymnasia before, but now it had to be. For Humboldt, elementary school is where you learn the basics. In secondary school, the gymnasium, you are slowly freed from the teacher. In short, this is where you learn, how to learn, on your own. And here we come to the third part of Humboldt's education system, universities. Now, there are universities in Prussia. He attended one briefly.

But Humboldt wants universities to be modernized. There were improvements being made in universities in the 18th century. What's new, it seems to me, is first of all just the idea of having a university in Berlin at all. Having it in this capital of the most powerful state in Germany until then had not been done. So that was a major step. But the second part, and perhaps most important, was the philosophy of higher education that was to be enacted there, at least in principle. And that was not entirely clear in Humboldt's day because the ideas that are attributed to Humboldt now were not published in his lifetime. Although it was known by word of mouth, so to speak, that he had been the man behind the founding of the University of Berlin,

the idea of his actually enacting a philosophy of higher education through founding the university, of Berlin is a later invention, specifically an invention of the early 20th century. And the idea of calling him the father of the modern research university is an even later invention. I don't know that Humboldt would have known what the term research university actually means. He certainly would not have, he would have been utterly astonished by the present day research university. But he did have very clear conceptions of what he thought the higher learning should consist in. They weren't published, as I said, in his lifetime, but in a sketch about the organization of the sciences in Berlin

there stated quite clearly a sketch was not completed but it's so brilliant that it's been reprinted many times after it was discovered and the briefest way of putting it is in a statement of his own in which he said in scientific learning

as a Witsenshaft meaning scientific learning it applies to the sciences and the humanities done properly it's not about learning facts and repeating them afterwards in an examination It's about doing research together, the professor and the students, doing research together with common texts and sources and materials, so that, and this is the quote that I'm now using, the students are not there for the professors, and the professors are not there for the students, but both of them are there for science and scholarship.

That is such a brilliant statement of his idea. deal that I constantly cited even though it was not published in Humboldt's lifetime. Another key element is what we now refer to as academic freedom. Humboldt writes, The idea of an academy must be noted as the highest and the last free place of science and most independent from the state. Of course, that means students and professors need to be free to discuss controversial thoughts and ideas. For at the university, antagonism and friction is salutary and necessary, and the collision that occurs between the teachers through their business itself can also shift their point of view involuntarily.

To ensure universities will grow and flourish, Humboldt argues they need to be financially independent from the state. Philip von Turk. One of the things that Humboldt wanted to do was to create this new model of the university. You know, he revamped the whole primary system in line with the precepts of Pestalazzi and he got a lot of people to help them with that. But he also reformed the university system. And one of the things that he wanted to do was to provide them universities, you know, starting with the university in Berlin and using that as a model, with an endowment. Why? So that the university would be independent. And that was a very important concept to homeboat, academic

freedom. Again, you know, notions of freedom, development, you know, the university as a place to do new things, find out new things, research new things, without being constrained by political interests or cultural interests, academic freedom, what this was about. So he wanted them to be endowed. That meant, you know, having certain, you know, the revenues from certain properties given over to the university. So the landowners did not like this. You can understand why, because it was going to be their land. And they didn't like all of this stuff and they didn't see a need for it.

And that was what he had to contend with. And eventually, he just couldn't put up with it anymore. And so he only lasted 18 months. But he achieved an enormous amount. And there are other theories for why he quit, Mitchell Ash. There's a lot of different accounts that are offered for that. But the main reason I think everyone has agreed is that he applied to be granted the title of minister and in the ideal world to actually have his department become a new

ministry of higher education, or just education in general, and that application was denied. And he felt snubbed by that, and he said, I don't need this, and he left. Goes back into the diplomatic service, serves in a number of places, but including also Rome. But his most important achievement was to then become the founder of modern language study. What we now call linguistics. He wrote basic texts, how to study language as a research proposition, and did himself a really esoteric research on languages that hadn't been well known until that time and became very famous for that. Philip Bon Turk. So Humbold was a man of many interests.

He spent quite a bit of time in Spain to study the Basque language. You know, Basque is a very strange language. It is unlike any other language in Europe. into European, it's not Semitic, it's none of these things. And that's what drew him. And he wrote a grammar, you know, Basque grammar. He himself spoke at least half a dozen European language, which is German, of course, French, everybody spoke French if you were educated, English.

This was a group of people who were very impressed by Shakespeare. It was a brilliant translation of Shakespeare into German, but all these folks could read English. Czech, Hungarian, Estonian, Estonian is also kind of a unique language. You know, it's not Slavic. He spoke all of these languages. His brother, Alexander, you know, the great scientist, spent a long time in Latin America and studying the geography and the culture. So one of the things that comes out of that is that Humboldt gets also very interested

in this, and he does grammars for Native American languages. and, you know, Latin American, Native American languages. He really gets into that. He gets into Sanskrit. Chinese. He studies a language in Java, you know, Java in Indonesia. He's all over the place. Language is deeply entwined in the intellectual development of humanity itself.

Language is, as it were, the external manifestation of the minds of peoples. Their language is their soul. and their soul is their language. It's impossible to conceive them ever sufficiently identical. The creation of language is an innate necessity of humanity. It is not a mere external vehicle designed to sustain social intercourse, but an indispensable factor for the development of human intellectual powers, culminating in the formulation of philosophical doctrine.

In a lot of circles, this is what he's remembered for linguistics, and like Nalm Chomsky, a well-known linguistic kind of philosopher of our own time. Humbold, heavily influenced that whole tradition and by these incredible interests that he had. And this is what he pursued while he was in his retirement, so to speak. And he published his correspondence, including the correspondence with his wife, where in a sort of idealized form, they talk about the nature of marriage and the role of the man and the woman

and the proper relationships and all of this kind of stuff. He was prolific. So he did a lot of stuff. Eventually, he would be afflicted with Parkinson's, and then he died. But he did an enormous amount of stuff. He was a very hardworking person.

You might say that his own building was never finished. And for him, Bill Dung was a lifelong project, and he would feel that that would be the case for everybody. Now, everyone should be dedicated to his own building for their entire life, and that's what he exemplified. So where is Bill Dung today? After all, 200 years ago, it was central to Humboldt's system of education,

a system we adopted. Do we care about nurturing potential? Critical thinkers? Do we need them to build a better world? We ask these questions and more in part two. In the meantime, let's leave the final word to the man himself, Wilhelm van Humboldt. No matter how good or great a man may be,

there is yet a better and a greater man within him. You were listening to Part 1 of Humboldt's Ghost, presented by Ideas contributor Carl Turner. In part two, we'll look at how Humboldt's template for a public education system spread throughout the world and what happened to his core principle of Bildung. You can go to our website, cbc.ca.ca slash ideas, to see additional material for this documentary. This series is produced by Mary Link. Technical production, Danielle Duval, Sam McNulty, 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.