Humboldt on Education

Teaching People to Think for Themselves

Casino on the boardwalk, Asbury Park.

In my leisure reading I try to strike out in new directions. Odd how the diversions have a habit of gently guiding me back to my central concerns. 

Here's a passage about Wilhelm von Humboldt, a German educator from the early nineteenth century. It's worth remembering how long these ideas have been around, even though so many of us seem never to have made their acquaintance. 

"In 1806, Humboldt was living with his family in Rome, hard at work on a translation of Aeschylus's Agamemnon. Only after the collapse of Prussia and the plundering by French troops of the Humboldt family residence in Tegel to the north of Berlin did he resolve to return to his beleaguered homeland. It was only with great reluctance that he agreed to accept a post in the new administration. 

"Once installed, however, Humboldt unfolded a profoundly liberal reform programme that transformed education in Prussia. For the first time, the kingdom acquired a single, standardized system of public instruction attuned to the latest trends in progressive European pedagogy. Education as such, Humboldt declared, was henceforth to be decoupled from the idea of technical or vocational training. Its purpose was not to turn cobblers' boys into cobblers, but to turn 'children into people.' The reformed schools were not merely to induct pupils into a specific subject matter, but to instil in them the capacity to think and learn for themselves. 'The pupil is mature,' he wrote, 'when he has learned enough from others to be in a position to learn for himself.'" 

This is from pages 331-332 of Christopher Clark's Iron Kingdom: the Rise and Fall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (2006). (Footnotes omitted.) 

I'd heard the Humboldt name before - there is, after all, the Humboldt Current in the Pacific - but it turns out the current is named for Wilhelm's younger brother, Alexander, so it's entirely possible that I had never heard of Wilhelm before delving into Professor Clark's book. 

The elder Humboldt was effectively the Prussian minister of education during a time known as the Prussian Reform, which took place after the catastrophic defeat of the Prussian army by French forces under the command Napoleon Bonaparte, at Jena in 1806. 

Politics in Prussia took a conservative turn from 1819, but Humboldt's edifice proved durable. "In the 1840s, when the American educational reformer Horace Mann visited Berlin, he was surprised to observe that school children in Prussia were taught to exercise their mental faculties for themselves by teachers whose techniques were anything but authoritarian. 'Though I saw hundreds of schools and [...] tens of thousands of pupils' Mann wrote, 'I never saw one child undergoing punishment for misconduct. I never saw one child in tears from having been punished, or from fear of being punished.' Liberal visitors from Britain frequently expressed their surprise that such a 'despotic' political arrangement should have produced such a progressive and open-minded educational system." (Clark, p. 407.) 

The summit of Humboldt's achievement was the new Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat, founded in Berlin in 1810 and renamed Humboldt-Universitat in 1949. "The Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat, with its powerful commitment to the freedom of research, became a model admired across Europe and widely emulated in the United States, where Humboldt's prescriptions helped to establish the idea of a modern academy." (Clark, p. 341.) 

I've given this matter some thought, and I think that I personally owe quite a lot to Wilhelm von Humboldt. I'm glad to have gotten to know him a little better.

Also at the casino.

See also The Real Parallels Are With Weimar, A Lesson From the Berlin Wall, A Teacher's Dilemma.