A university dropout designed the model for modern public education
Wilhelm von Humboldt was schooled at home and never completed his brief university studies, yet he reshaped Prussian schooling, founded the university in Berlin that now bears his family's name, and argued that education should cultivate whole human beings rather than drill them for a job. His ideas travelled to America and Japan.
Born in Potsdam on 22 June 1767, Humboldt was the elder brother of the naturalist Alexander. In 1809 the Prussian king pulled him from his diplomatic post in Rome, rather against his wishes, to run the education directorate. He standardised public instruction from basic schools to secondary level, introduced uniform state examinations and inspections, set up a department to design curricula and textbooks, and founded Berlin University. In 1949 it was renamed after both brothers.
His reasoning, set out in a letter to the king, was that general knowledge and a cultivated character come first; a person who is a good, well-informed citizen can pick up trade skills easily and switch careers later. The philosopher Julian Nida-Rümelin has invoked that ideal against modern policy that treats schooling as labour-market preparation, saying Europe must choose between McKinsey and Humboldt.
Earlier, in 1791 to 1792, he had written The Limits of State Action, a bold defence of individual liberty that went unpublished until 1850. It sketched an early form of what John Stuart Mill would call the harm principle and shaped Mill's On Liberty. As a diplomat he helped persuade Austria to join Prussia and Russia against Napoleon at Prague in 1813, but the Prussian government's reactionary turn drove him out of politics in 1819.
He spent his last years on language. Two trips to the Basque Country led him to argue, from place names, that Basque-related speech once spread across Spain, southern France and the Balearics; the details have since been superseded. He died on 8 April 1835 while writing on Kawi, an old language of Java. Its introduction proposed that each language has an inner form reflecting how its speakers see the world, an idea later linked to linguistic relativity. Noam Chomsky often quotes his phrase that language makes infinite use of finite means, although one Humboldt scholar warns that the two men's views differ deeply.
Source: Wilhelm von Humboldt
