Prussian philosopher, linguist and diplomat (1767-1835). As head of education in the Prussian interior ministry in 1809-1810 he reformed the school system and founded the University of Berlin, now the Humboldt University, on the model of the research university that bears his name [IC].
Contribution
Humboldt treated Bildung as the purpose of education: the fullest and most balanced development of a person’s powers, pursued for life and wider than training in skills. His reforms put that idea into institutions, and the research university joined teaching to inquiry. On the wiki he holds the formative half of an inheritance he shared with his younger brother Alexander von Humboldt, who held the relational science of nature; see Aesthetic Education.
Selected works
- The Limits of State Action (written 1792, published 1850)
- On Language: On the Diversity of Human Language Construction (1836)
Related pages
Provenance
Created 30 October 2026 with the Bildung pages, from the public record.