But English is not your first language? — No problem. Write your text in English as well as you can or write it in your own language and run it through, say, Google Translate, then proofread it as well as you can and when you are ready to submit your text, follow the procedure described here: https://medium.com/bildung/get-published-in-bildung-a69fab1c761 One of our reasons for starting Bildung here on medium.com is that we want to give bildung people from around the globe a chance to share their bildung experiences, research, ideas, best practices, philosophy, etc.

Better Bildung, Better Future May 9, 2021 We need better Bildung for a better future — for the sake of coming generations and for our own! Read the manifesto below or go to https://europeanbildung.net/manifesto/ where you can also sign it. With this manifesto, we, the signatories, offer a framework for Bildung. This manifesto speaks…

Heritage and history allow us to navigate the world. We need to know where we are coming from in order to extrapolate between past and present, and create an informed vision for the future. Heritage is one’s personal lineage back into history. It is where I and my family are coming from, and it is the norms and expectations that I carry with me. It is also the symbolic world, the moral values, and the culture that have shaped my relatives and me.

Particularly the communication technologies are driving societal development and as new technologies emerge, we almost automatically strive to follow what is going on in order to join the new kinds of conversation and interaction that follow the technologies. But we also need to think critically about how we connect with…

Part of bildung in the modern world is to understand science and to have a sense of what is scientific facts, what is a qualified hypothesis, what is personal opinion, what is beliefs, and where is the boundary of one’s knowledge. One should also understand some of the basics of…

Educating and transferring knowledge from one person to the next are two very different things. Just like leadership and bossing people around are two very different things. Education and educating include bildung, and good leadership requires bildung and promotes bildung. The poor teacher dictates what the right results are and pupils are rewarded for reproducing existing knowledge; the poor boss dictates results and behaviors.

Humans live for beauty. We are truly alive when we channel creative expression into art. We tend to forget this, because we have told ourselves that money is more important. Procreation, eating and bringing up our offspring are important too, of course, but the arts and aesthetics are where we develop new symbolic worlds that allow us to communicate, think, be human, and become more humane. Arts and aesthetics can challenge our worldviews and offer us pushbacks. These are some of the pushbacks that make us grow. As we struggle with new expressions, symbols, thoughts, and ideas, we challenge our brains and our inner selves.

Is nature and food bildung? Yes. We are a part of nature and we need to understand how we, humans as a species and as individuals, families and societies, can thrive and replenish the nature that brought us forth. We need to live in symbiosis with all other species on…

The earliest philosophers were in fact exploring the human psyche, and psychology as an academic field in the modern sense emerged from philosophy. With the invention of psychoanalysis and psychological experiments, our understanding of animal and human psychology expanded vastly. …