To initiate a new industrial revolution by precipitating today a comparable innovation thrust as that of Prussia's advancement sketched above, we obviously have to widen the base of application of the Humboldt model.
As envisaged in 19th century Prussia, only a small elite would participate both in higher education and in the affairs of the State. In contrast, we have to conceive a more democratic participation. Also, the reform thrust today must go deeper, encompassing economic, educational and administrative spheres, making room for the emerging ideas of economic democracy and knowledge based economy. That is, Humboldts ideal of university as combining „Wissenschaft als Bildung and Lebensführung“ need to be renewed and extended in its connotation, more inclusive in its understanding of what society and democratic participation are.
The old way: knowledge as product
This understanding of democratic participation is the element which distinguishes the envisaged Humboldt centres differ from the old Humboldt model and the now in vogue technological centres. The latter, propagated in the wake of awareness of the task of controlling environmental pollution, are conceived more as an interface between Global institutions and local milieu. They are meant on the one hand to make the big firms and scientific research institutes in the Metropolitan countries familiar with local needs and cultural sensibilities of the rural milieu in NICs and developing countries, and on the other hand, to make the rural people familiar with alternative technologies available for them to adopt. The knowledge and industrial processes figure in this conception as premade products made available by a small elite. People at large are just consumers of those readily available products. They do not figure in as reflective human beings participating in the processes of knowledge or industrial production. Putting aside the humanistic considerations why such a model is unsatisfactory for leading a good life, there are issues of practicability arising from such an approach.
First, the very gigantic nature of the task: Compared to the scale of transformation from agrarian to industrial economy today, what took place in 19th century Europe is minuscule. The numbers, in China and India alone, of those uprooted from the old agrarian economy and flocking to Megacities seeking better life, is enough to beat our powers of imagination. This situation cannot be mastered if we approach it by employing an old style of industrialization extended to the global scale, supplemented with some new technologies. Unlike in the 19th century, the resources of the entire earth are not available for a small percentage of population to exploit without causing the destruction of our home planet. It is an entirely new situation adequately grasped only if we look at it as a new stage of human existence.
The new way: knowledge as process
Instead of looking at people as a new strata of consumers, the need is to make people participate as active citizens striving for a remaking of their environment – both social and natural. Even adapting the available alternative technologies must be associated with an awareness of their social and natural impact. Otherwise what we get is evidenced in the roads of India: increased numbers of cars cluttering the inadequate roads littered with all sorts of pollution on the one hand and an increasing gap between rich and poor exacerbating social unrest and violence.
In fact, there are already many groups thirsting for taking their destiny on their own hand and pondering the ways to do it. Providing social institutions for such people to interact and innovate is the only way how even the limited aims of technology centres can be realised. In fact, sustainability requires use and adaptation of local materials and resources, and this implies people looking at their environment in new ways and capable of restructuring them. An approach to people as active re-makers of their environment has to resort to the idea of education as liberal education, „Bildung“, as the Humboldt Model did.
We require institutional nodes that provide a global perspective for the local milieu and knowledge by establishing relationships, exchanges and perspectives on a global scale. For this, we need something more than familiarity with local needs: we require centres of alternative life-styles compatible with, but at the same time alternative to local agrarian economy. These centres need to generate a global horizon of thinking, combining it with local knowledge and local roots, bringing about both a higher level of reflection and adaptation of the locally integrated life-styles and the lived-in world.
