Bildung and the Function Problem
Wilhelm von Humboldt's idea of education as self-formation looks increasingly useful when AI handles the tasks that used to define professional identity.
Wilhelm von Humboldt is one of those figures I knew only by association: the brother, the geographical namesake, the name on the university. The actual ideas, I had missed.
A piece from the Cosmos Institute put Humboldt's concept of Bildung in front of me. The argument is simple and uncomfortable: education shaped by Humboldt was about forming a whole person, not training a function. The modern professional world, by contrast, has spent a century doing the opposite. We have been very good at turning people into functions.
The Bildung idea
Bildung is hard to translate, which is part of why it stayed in German. It means something like self-cultivation through engagement with the world: art, science, language, culture, other people. German has a second word for the other model: Ausbildung, vocational training, formation toward a function. The prefix aus signals completion, extraction, being shaped into a finished product. One word for becoming a person. One word for becoming a role.
The goal of Bildung is not competence in a domain. The goal is a richer, more capacious person. Humboldt believed the university existed to develop that person, not to fill a role.
This is not naive idealism. Humboldt was a state official. He designed the University of Berlin in 1810 with this philosophy embedded in the structure: research and teaching together, students as active participants, knowledge pursued for its own sake. The model spread across Europe and shaped what we call research universities.
The function trap
What the Cosmos Institute piece points at, and what I find genuinely interesting, is that AI is now exposing a tension that was always there. When knowledge work was scarce and complex, being a good function was valuable. You knew the law, the process, the domain. That knowledge was your identity, your leverage, your job security.
AI is eroding the scarcity. Not all of it, and not evenly, but the trend is clear enough that the question becomes: what remains when the function is cheaper to automate than to hire?
The Humboldt answer, if taken seriously, is that what remains is the person. The capacity to make judgements, to hold complexity, to bring a formed perspective to an ambiguous situation. None of those come from function-training. They come from exactly the kind of broad, messy, integrative engagement that Bildung describes and modern professional education systematically devalues.
What I do not know
I want to be honest about the limits of what I am saying here. I have not read Humboldt, I have encountered the idea. I am not a philosopher of education or a historian of the university. What I can say is that the frame feels generative: it names something I have been sensing without having the word for it.
The risk of reaching for Humboldt now is that it becomes a nostalgic move, a way of dressing up the resistance to change in the language of classical education. The universities Humboldt influenced are not obviously doing Bildung today. They are credentialing machines with research departments attached.
The more interesting question is whether the AI transition creates conditions where something like Bildung becomes practically useful again, not as philosophy, but as a competitive model for how people and organisations develop. Whether that is inspiration or a warning, I genuinely do not know.
Rob Hoeijmakers