As Prussia began rebuilding from the wreckage, most people assumed it needed more officers, administrators, and engineers. People who could do things. The task of designing the new system of education fell to a thirty-two-year-old diplomat named Wilhelm von Humboldt. He gave them something else entirely.
In a series of memoranda written over the next year, he laid out a vision for a new university in Berlin organized around Bildung. The word has no English equivalent. “Education” is too narrow, “self-improvement” too thin. “Formation” gets closest but still misses its moral weight.