Wilhelm von Humboldt

Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt (1767 to 1835) was a Prussian philosopher, linguist, government functionary and diplomat, and the founder of what became Humboldt University of Berlin, which was named after him and his younger brother, the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, in 1949. As a linguist he made contributions to the philosophy of language, to ethnolinguistics and to the theory and practice of education, and he helped develop liberalism by treating education as a means of realizing individual possibility rather than drilling established ideas into the young to fit them for a fixed social role. He was the architect of the Humboldtian education ideal, adopted from its beginning as a model for public education in Prussia and later in the United States and Japan, and he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1822.