Abstract

The concept of Bildung, as it has been developed within the framework of the German Idealism, does not refer to any particular social sphere like schooling, teaching, training etc. but to the character, the directions and the mechanisms of human development in general. We can find probably the most elaborated version of the concept of Bildung via human development in the work of G. F. Hegel. That is way I focus in this paper exclusively on Hegel’s concept of Bildung. In the first part of my paper I try to show how Hegel spells out this concept in order to describe the very process of development of humanity within the single person. In the second part of the paper I link the Hegelian concept of Bildung to the pedagogical question of what educative teaching consists in and how we can discriminate between educative and non-educative forms of teaching. This is, so to say, a Hegelian move beyond Hegel who himself did not systematically explore any pedagogical topics. Nevertheless, my claim is that his concept of Bildung has very important pedagogical implications.