Education as Self-Fashioning: How to Become a Global Citizen?

The concept of a liberal arts education was first developed in eighteenth-century Prussia by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) and soon adopted by other countries, including the United States. Humboldt considered a liberal arts education to be both a foundational and transformative process in the development of the self, and he was convinced that it was essential in creating moral and ethical citizens in an increasingly global world. From his point of view, the cultivation of oneself leads to the freedom of thought, freedom to act, freedom to assert oneself as an individual, freedom to access knowledge, and freedom to determine one's own role in society. In this course we will explore Humboldt's concept of education and examine the ways in which it is reflected and refracted in debates about university education still today. This course satisfies the Aesthetic and Interpretive Inquiry WAY (AII).