ABSTRACT
In this chapter a concept, a new process, the educationalization of the world, was heralded. The concept came to dominate the literary and philosophical discourses that first gave rise to it. John Locke is seen, in American circles in particular, as an influential philosopher of education, one of the first to articulate the foundation for and the problems of education in a liberal political society. This chapter focusses on the different fundaments underlying a concept of Bildung, with special attention to the ideas of perfectibility and wholeness in the domains of ethics, aesthetics, and religion. A second cultural fundament for the evolution of Bildung into an educational concept is found in the link between ethics and aesthetics. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Genevan philosopher, in his novel Emile (1762), addresses the idea of perfectibility. The story of Emile combines a concept of human perfectibility with a belief in the practicability and predictability of education.
