ABSTRACT
The character of higher education, the institutionalized form of Bildung, affected to a considerable degree the curriculum in the Gymnasium, where students prepared to enter university. The adoption of concept of Bildung at the institutional level and associated attempts at nation-building were of consequence for the founding of the University of Berlin in 1810. The Gymnasium and university course of study focused on objects of the ancient world because it was believed that the potential of each individual could best be realized only in confrontation with the ideal that the objects represented. Parallel to the elementary school, the plan provided a pre-school for students who wished to go on to the Gymnasium. The development of a specifically social or class-conscious concept of Bil-dung in the nineteenth century is closely tied to the figure of the German bourgeois and the emergence of a new class to which it belonged, the bourgeoisie. In Friedrich Nietzsche's view, Bildung had essentially become a commodity.
