Wilhelm Von Humboldt: The Theory and Practice of Self-Formation (Bildung), 1791-1810

Curriculum and School Leadership – Adjusting School Leadership to Curriculum

“…humanistic Bildung, self-cultivation is essential in terms of being the path to cultural knowledge and to become a mature personality that can engage productively and critically in society. The task of education is to support this self-developmental process (Sorkin 1983). The connection between leadership and Bildung is thus established through the purpose of education.…”

IRRODL Volume 14, Number 3

“…contrasts, and hierarchical structures as they might reflect mental characteristics or organizing principles. The actantial model (Greimas, 1966;1983;Hiernaux, 1977;Piret, Nizet & Bourgeois, 1996) enables identification of the structures of meaning that guided perceptions and behaviors by breaking the narrative discourse into seven "actantial roles". The main three are (1) the subject, the narrator of the story; (2) the object, what the subject is directed toward; and (3) the actions undertaken by the subject to reach this objective.…”

“…Self-development is not an adaptation to an external order but rather a cultivation of the inner life: a reflective, creative form of self-realization or self-cultivation which, crucially, is achieved in and through relations with others (Sorkin, 1983). Humboldt also advocated informal education that was free from state interference.…”

Sigmund Freud, Géza Róheim and the Strehlows: Oedipal tales from Central Australian anthropology

“…This notion of Bildung can be traced back to Goethe and Herder's contemporary, Wilhelm von Humboldt (Dumont 1994: 82-144;Sorkin 1983), the linguist and educationalist perhaps better known in anthropology for his idea of Weltansicht or 'world view'-a forerunner of the now better known Weltanschauung (Underhill 2009 (Curran 2002: 2;Dumont 1994: 145-95), the novel genre that portrays Bildung as 'coming of age' or self-realisation through change and moral or cultural development. Matters connected to Bildung and the relationship between the individual and culture would eventually find their way into American anthropology after Boas, classically in Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934), but in Freud's hands the associated life-narrative function was transferred to the methodological injunction 'know thyself ', the most famous of the maxims inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, where, in Greek mythology, both Laius and Oedipus consulted the oracle to be warned about parricide and incest (Graves 1960: 9-15).…”