The work offers a conceptual-historical analysis that responds to the provocation that education is historically outdated or empirically useless. Based on the forms of the understanding of education in the second half of the 20th century, the main part of the work explores the roots of the German concept of education, including those of Meister Eckhart, Nikolaus von Kues, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Herder, Fichte, and Schiller. Above all, moments of internalization and spiritualization characterize the classical understanding, which sees education primarily as a privilege of the bourgeoisie. It was precisely through German idealism that education was associated with the concept of a strong, self-organizing subject. In contrast, Egbert Witte emphasizes that education is opposed to any "dispositive rationalism" and pleads for a changed conception of education, in which moments of.