Good piece. Been thinking about this a lot recently as I near the end of undergrad. The problem is people respond best by being shown, not told, & what they’re shown are success narratives that seem reducible to function. If you want to change this, you need to somehow show people that this reduction doesn’t work, and that Bildung is needed. Or else that the narratives are wrong about what success is.
Brendan, this guy is spot on. How would you respond to his comment, and address an incoming freshman about how to structure his collegiate life, or how to think about consulting/banking/any kind of finance senior year?
Unfortunately the reduction does work for certain set of goals…and the cultural narratives for success serve cultural needs.
The system itself is unlikely to change until the economic incentives change. What is left then is a private commitment to practices that reaffirm one’s personhood coupled with an operational expansion of the notion of self beyond local concerns.
So promote the idea that institutions are not designed to deeply validate your humanity in the spirit of Bildung. Find ways outside of the institutions to validate one’s self. If there is someone in an institution that does, great.
It's true that formation can't be training -- establishing end states sets the path in stone. But it's a problem that vexes any institution operating at some scale. Standardization is required, and that means establishing hard targets. Further, in education the institutions, themselves, are judged on job and graduate school placement rates. Goodhart's Law takes hold and missions are corrupted to varying degrees. That's why reforms, like Frey's at Tulsa, keep failing. The church was once the place to go for formation. The strong telos of the church kept it from succumbing to short- and mid-run incentives like market forces. Now that schools have taken up the mantle of moral formation as the church has faded, how does an educational institution internalize a better telos? What does a secular institution anchor on that could loosen the grip of the market?
Educational institution can’t serve a better telos. They serve the ones that keep them in business. The church actually does the same thing, so I’m not sure it is a better example that supports a cultural Bildung. Formation in the church is still tied to legitimacy, status sorting and the like which usually involve some kind of utility classing. In the current environment this really is a private matter that expands socially when enough people think it is important enough to spend their discretionary resources on.
Donald Winnicott and his wife Clare wrote about the “holding environment” for the development of a child from a mid-century social work perspective. Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky repurposed it towards thinking about the container within which sustained moral change can take place. They called that leadership.
Your piece spoke to me about the environment needed to help shape humans with virtue. I’ll call it leadership for higher education.
Tomas Bjorkman and Jonathan Rowson have gone ahead and set bildung as the third pillar in helping our society reorient towards the metacrisis.
I think you’re onto something crucial. I wonder though, if universities can course correct or whether the economic incentives will always be perverse?
"I think you’re onto something crucial. I wonder though, if universities can course correct or whether the economic incentives will always be perverse?"
hmm…this is exactly the kind of contradiction as corruption perspective that seems resistant to the notion that the position is by design. I say contradiction as corruption because the universities are most likely not going to course correct because their mandate does not call for them directly address power asymmetries. Universities are oriented toward activities like legitimacy maintenance, credentialing, and knowledge production. Economic incentives will remain as they are utility over personhood until it is no longer profitable.
No argument from me. Their mandate is subject to what Guattari called IWC, Integrated World Capitalism. His advice was cultivating dissenting and yet somehow (in yet to figure out how obvs.) collective mental ecologies.
the answer I think lies in people like you and I actually working together to create spaces where these things are practiced and refusing to let it degrade into some kind of therapy...cultural capture from the bottom up is possible...very difficult I think...but Bildung is one of variety of topics for said organization: moral courage under pressure, intellectual honesty, the nature of personhood, recognition that it it is not possible to locally care for millions of people, etc...I say this because very few people have ever responded in agreement with me :) and yes, this is not like the happiness project in Harvard :) all the best.
The title alone is a bold stance in the futurist and tech world in 2026, even if people might like to suggest otherwise, so, respect for keeping it as it is.
Humboldt designed for formation in a nation hungry for function. What strikes me is that the erosion of Bildung wasn't accidental — it followed the same logic as other systems redesigned around extraction rather than flourishing. A person formed to think freely is harder to reduce to an economic unit. The question worth sitting with isn't just how we restore formation — but what conditions actually make it possible for ordinary people, not just those with inherited leisure.
Fantastic piece. The emphasis on designing an optimal environment rather than a curriculum is critical. In K12 there's often so much noise around the "what" and not enough serious contemplation around creating the conditions for becoming to emerge.
I have a 20 year old son in germany, facing this ausbildung dilemma and your article helped explai everybody around him what Wilhelm VH had in mind in establishing it.
He loves cooking but not being in a restaurant all afternoon and half the night.
Now he is beginning to search for philosophy or literature with philisophy and your article was the inspiration.
Sorry, but your attempt to imply the university was diverted away from Bildung is simply not true. Bildung may have been a legitimating ideal, but the university was structurally entangled with state formation, elite reproduction, and professional sorting from its very instantiation, as you can’t, for example, have a labor pool unless you have persons as economic functions. Yes, of course, a person is not an economic function. But there is little actual incentive for those in a position of power with certain goals to not treat a person as said function. Response to that treatment, as you can imagine is quite a different battle, and I don’t think at its root as anything to do with AI at source. I guess the deeper question is how can an individual use AI to get themselves out of the trap. And how can that strategy scale such that it is not one in a million who get themselves out.
This is a very interesting piece. I like how it brings up the idea that education is not about fact learning but about human formation. I get your concerns about AI and how, right now, fact learning is a big part of how we accomplish human formation. You need to be humble enough to acknowledge there are things you don't know, you need to have the social skills to work with others to acquire that knowledge, you need to develop systems thinking to integrate those facts into your existing knowledge base, and you need to be capable of adapting to the world with that new knowledge.
The concern is what happens when AI just gives you the facts without any struggle. I would say that most of these steps still exist. It can't (at least right now) plug that information directly into your brain, and you need to still figure out how to absorb it. We've never considered the usage of a tutor or mentor to be "fake learning," so I don't see why that tutor being robotic should change that. The biggest risk is that the AI takes over the application of knowledge to the real world, by automating work, but then it isn't automating education so much as it is bypassing the need for credentialism.
If I could just spend my time learning things, without any need to decide if they are "practical," then that would be paradise. I'm reading Substack and watching educational YouTube because they help me think better, not because I'm trying to get a job as a Substack reviewer.
Maybe the real answer is that when we are freed from the need to prove our worth to society in order to deserve to live, slotting ourselves into narrow roles and specializing, then we can become more fully rounded generalists. The smartest and most exciting people in the world are those who spend their time branching out rather than diving deep into only one topic. Humans could easily be the synthesis layer on top of AI-based knowledge acquisition, where it helps us discover new facts about the world and puzzle through their connections, but it is humans who create the meaning and stories behind these facts that allow us to dream of things that never before existed.
I think the kind of liberal education you describe as Bildung is only possible when people don't feel the pressure to be immediately useful in life. Education ebbs and flows with this current.
Historically university students were from the upper class. Success for an aristocrat was all but assured, and a well-rounded education was an affordable luxury. Of course others lower in the pecking order had much more practical educations, but those people weren't at Harvard or Cambridge.
The post-war period in the U.S. creating a striking condition: As far as the global economy was considered, most Americans were effectively part of an upper class. This fueled high university enrollment by Baby Boomers, and an expansion of "impractical" liberal arts departments like English, Literature, and History. In the 1950s and 60s, almost no matter who you were, jobs were plentiful and houses were affordable.
Globalization has changed all of that. Americans of every class are now in direct competition with people in China, Korea, Europe, and elsewhere. Success is assured for nobody. Most couples assume they will need two good incomes to afford a place to live. In this environment a liberal education (and kids, unfortunately) become luxuries that fewer people can afford.
In an ideal world, AI will create a post-scarcity society that frees all of us from the need to be immediately useful, and expansive education will flourish. It could go in many other directions though.
In your vision, where do people go to learn economically useful skills (function, not formation)? Is it publicly or privately provisioned? And when? Is it after time spent in a University focused on formation?
Really enjoyed this one. The educational system fragmented knowledge into departments and I think that's becoming less relevant by the day. Mill's description of a human being as more like a tree than a steam engine is going to stick with me. Now AI is automating the exact functions students trained for. Formation over function. Stop asking "what should I learn to be useful?" and start asking "what kind of thinker am I becoming?"
Good piece. Been thinking about this a lot recently as I near the end of undergrad. The problem is people respond best by being shown, not told, & what they’re shown are success narratives that seem reducible to function. If you want to change this, you need to somehow show people that this reduction doesn’t work, and that Bildung is needed. Or else that the narratives are wrong about what success is.
basically. we need to rethink the society reward system.
Brendan, this guy is spot on. How would you respond to his comment, and address an incoming freshman about how to structure his collegiate life, or how to think about consulting/banking/any kind of finance senior year?
Unfortunately the reduction does work for certain set of goals…and the cultural narratives for success serve cultural needs.
The system itself is unlikely to change until the economic incentives change. What is left then is a private commitment to practices that reaffirm one’s personhood coupled with an operational expansion of the notion of self beyond local concerns.
So promote the idea that institutions are not designed to deeply validate your humanity in the spirit of Bildung. Find ways outside of the institutions to validate one’s self. If there is someone in an institution that does, great.
It's true that formation can't be training -- establishing end states sets the path in stone. But it's a problem that vexes any institution operating at some scale. Standardization is required, and that means establishing hard targets. Further, in education the institutions, themselves, are judged on job and graduate school placement rates. Goodhart's Law takes hold and missions are corrupted to varying degrees. That's why reforms, like Frey's at Tulsa, keep failing. The church was once the place to go for formation. The strong telos of the church kept it from succumbing to short- and mid-run incentives like market forces. Now that schools have taken up the mantle of moral formation as the church has faded, how does an educational institution internalize a better telos? What does a secular institution anchor on that could loosen the grip of the market?
Educational institution can’t serve a better telos. They serve the ones that keep them in business. The church actually does the same thing, so I’m not sure it is a better example that supports a cultural Bildung. Formation in the church is still tied to legitimacy, status sorting and the like which usually involve some kind of utility classing. In the current environment this really is a private matter that expands socially when enough people think it is important enough to spend their discretionary resources on.
Donald Winnicott and his wife Clare wrote about the “holding environment” for the development of a child from a mid-century social work perspective. Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky repurposed it towards thinking about the container within which sustained moral change can take place. They called that leadership.
Your piece spoke to me about the environment needed to help shape humans with virtue. I’ll call it leadership for higher education.
Tomas Bjorkman and Jonathan Rowson have gone ahead and set bildung as the third pillar in helping our society reorient towards the metacrisis.
I think you’re onto something crucial. I wonder though, if universities can course correct or whether the economic incentives will always be perverse?
"I think you’re onto something crucial. I wonder though, if universities can course correct or whether the economic incentives will always be perverse?"
hmm…this is exactly the kind of contradiction as corruption perspective that seems resistant to the notion that the position is by design. I say contradiction as corruption because the universities are most likely not going to course correct because their mandate does not call for them directly address power asymmetries. Universities are oriented toward activities like legitimacy maintenance, credentialing, and knowledge production. Economic incentives will remain as they are utility over personhood until it is no longer profitable.
No argument from me. Their mandate is subject to what Guattari called IWC, Integrated World Capitalism. His advice was cultivating dissenting and yet somehow (in yet to figure out how obvs.) collective mental ecologies.
the answer I think lies in people like you and I actually working together to create spaces where these things are practiced and refusing to let it degrade into some kind of therapy...cultural capture from the bottom up is possible...very difficult I think...but Bildung is one of variety of topics for said organization: moral courage under pressure, intellectual honesty, the nature of personhood, recognition that it it is not possible to locally care for millions of people, etc...I say this because very few people have ever responded in agreement with me :) and yes, this is not like the happiness project in Harvard :) all the best.
The title alone is a bold stance in the futurist and tech world in 2026, even if people might like to suggest otherwise, so, respect for keeping it as it is.
Humboldt designed for formation in a nation hungry for function. What strikes me is that the erosion of Bildung wasn't accidental — it followed the same logic as other systems redesigned around extraction rather than flourishing. A person formed to think freely is harder to reduce to an economic unit. The question worth sitting with isn't just how we restore formation — but what conditions actually make it possible for ordinary people, not just those with inherited leisure.
Fantastic piece. The emphasis on designing an optimal environment rather than a curriculum is critical. In K12 there's often so much noise around the "what" and not enough serious contemplation around creating the conditions for becoming to emerge.
Very auspicious article.
I have a 20 year old son in germany, facing this ausbildung dilemma and your article helped explai everybody around him what Wilhelm VH had in mind in establishing it.
He loves cooking but not being in a restaurant all afternoon and half the night.
Now he is beginning to search for philosophy or literature with philisophy and your article was the inspiration.
Thank you Brendan!
Sorry, but your attempt to imply the university was diverted away from Bildung is simply not true. Bildung may have been a legitimating ideal, but the university was structurally entangled with state formation, elite reproduction, and professional sorting from its very instantiation, as you can’t, for example, have a labor pool unless you have persons as economic functions. Yes, of course, a person is not an economic function. But there is little actual incentive for those in a position of power with certain goals to not treat a person as said function. Response to that treatment, as you can imagine is quite a different battle, and I don’t think at its root as anything to do with AI at source. I guess the deeper question is how can an individual use AI to get themselves out of the trap. And how can that strategy scale such that it is not one in a million who get themselves out.
This is a very interesting piece. I like how it brings up the idea that education is not about fact learning but about human formation. I get your concerns about AI and how, right now, fact learning is a big part of how we accomplish human formation. You need to be humble enough to acknowledge there are things you don't know, you need to have the social skills to work with others to acquire that knowledge, you need to develop systems thinking to integrate those facts into your existing knowledge base, and you need to be capable of adapting to the world with that new knowledge.
The concern is what happens when AI just gives you the facts without any struggle. I would say that most of these steps still exist. It can't (at least right now) plug that information directly into your brain, and you need to still figure out how to absorb it. We've never considered the usage of a tutor or mentor to be "fake learning," so I don't see why that tutor being robotic should change that. The biggest risk is that the AI takes over the application of knowledge to the real world, by automating work, but then it isn't automating education so much as it is bypassing the need for credentialism.
If I could just spend my time learning things, without any need to decide if they are "practical," then that would be paradise. I'm reading Substack and watching educational YouTube because they help me think better, not because I'm trying to get a job as a Substack reviewer.
Maybe the real answer is that when we are freed from the need to prove our worth to society in order to deserve to live, slotting ourselves into narrow roles and specializing, then we can become more fully rounded generalists. The smartest and most exciting people in the world are those who spend their time branching out rather than diving deep into only one topic. Humans could easily be the synthesis layer on top of AI-based knowledge acquisition, where it helps us discover new facts about the world and puzzle through their connections, but it is humans who create the meaning and stories behind these facts that allow us to dream of things that never before existed.
Legacy education is a doomed, overpriced boondoggle. It will disappear forever once the yammering defenders have died off.
I think the kind of liberal education you describe as Bildung is only possible when people don't feel the pressure to be immediately useful in life. Education ebbs and flows with this current.
Historically university students were from the upper class. Success for an aristocrat was all but assured, and a well-rounded education was an affordable luxury. Of course others lower in the pecking order had much more practical educations, but those people weren't at Harvard or Cambridge.
The post-war period in the U.S. creating a striking condition: As far as the global economy was considered, most Americans were effectively part of an upper class. This fueled high university enrollment by Baby Boomers, and an expansion of "impractical" liberal arts departments like English, Literature, and History. In the 1950s and 60s, almost no matter who you were, jobs were plentiful and houses were affordable.
Globalization has changed all of that. Americans of every class are now in direct competition with people in China, Korea, Europe, and elsewhere. Success is assured for nobody. Most couples assume they will need two good incomes to afford a place to live. In this environment a liberal education (and kids, unfortunately) become luxuries that fewer people can afford.
In an ideal world, AI will create a post-scarcity society that frees all of us from the need to be immediately useful, and expansive education will flourish. It could go in many other directions though.
In your vision, where do people go to learn economically useful skills (function, not formation)? Is it publicly or privately provisioned? And when? Is it after time spent in a University focused on formation?
Really enjoyed this one. The educational system fragmented knowledge into departments and I think that's becoming less relevant by the day. Mill's description of a human being as more like a tree than a steam engine is going to stick with me. Now AI is automating the exact functions students trained for. Formation over function. Stop asking "what should I learn to be useful?" and start asking "what kind of thinker am I becoming?"