At the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, representatives of the politically oppressed middle class in a politically fragmented Germany began to look to education in search for a means of emancipation, with the pedagogical concept of "Bildung" as their central focus. The attractiveness of the concept was also a response to growing socio-economic complexity, differentiation and social disintegration. This paper considers the project of Friedrich Schiller around the idea of "Bildung." His thoughts challenge present tendencies of restorative traditionalism and technocratic economism. He argues for the cultivation of the "useless" imagination and of illusion as the necessary precondition and basis of freedom, morality and knowledge. He criticizes reason without irrationalism, advocates sensuousness without the idealization of brute force, and argues for playfulness in teaching and learning without aesthetization. (Contains 7 notes.)