IIn other words — specifically, Fichte’s — the purpose of the university was “the formation and development of the capacity to learn.” Of all these men, I think Fichte had the best understanding of how Romantic educational ideas would work in practice. His central idea was that universities should foster personal self-development (Bildung) as thinkers and scholars, but also as moral beings. In fact, these were the same thing. Through a carefully constructed program of seminars and socratic dialogues, students would be encouraged to cultivate the faculty of scholarly reason which would guide them through the world as fully-realized individuals.
The capacity to learn would serve students far beyond their university days. It was the same capacity that would allow them to discover new things about the world. Fichte’s friend Schleiermacher, the theologian, who shared many of his opinions, framed the same statement slightly differently. The university, he wrote, “forms the transition between the time when a young man is first prepared for systematic knowledge, by his own studying and by acquiring a knowledge base, and the time when, in the prime of his intellectual life, he expands the field or adds on a beautiful new wing to the edifice of knowledge through his own research.”
Schleiermacher didn’t want universities to be centers of research production. He still thought academies of science would serve that role. Still, for the Romantics, research was an essential part of being a professor — not because of their outputs, but because it was the only way they could model holistic intellectual inquiry for their students. The professor's job was to embody endless curiosity and dedication to the systematic pursuit of pure knowledge, which was, after all, man's highest calling.
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