To say that Humboldt’s reforms were a Faustian bargain may be going too far. system to restrict access to teaching faculties. Yet, the consequence of this development was the labyrinthine world of multiversities and hyper-specialization that we know today: delineated formal disciplines and sub-disciplines, specialized literatures inaccessible to the common reader, and the widespread usage of the Ph.D. His reforms were fabulously successful, jettisoning the German university system from relative obscurity to become the envy of the world, generating unprecedented quantities of knowledge, tremendous advances in technology, and scholarly colossi such as Planck and Heisenberg, Strauss and Weber, Freud and Nietzsche.
In modern times, we are heirs to a different reality – one conceived in the 19th century by the Prussian education minister Wilhelm von Humboldt, who proposed that the university be organized not around teaching but around conducting original research. Rather, he would go directly to its difficult passages and intricate problems and look at what its author had to say.” By the age of 21, there was no field of knowledge Ibn Sina was not familiar with. SCIENCE IDEAS: A HISTORY OF THOUGHT AND INVENTION, FROM FIRE TO FREUD By PETER WATSON Ī THOUSAND YEARS AGO, it was Still possible for Ibn Sina’s biographer, Juzajani, to write: “For the 25 years that I was his companion and servant, I did not once see him, when he came across a new book, examine it from beginning to end.
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