The article traces the circulation of the pedagogical notion of formale Bildung from Germany to Sweden during the first decades of the nineteenth century. At that time, educators and scholars agreed that the goal of secondary education was not to provide practical knowledge, but to train the mind and cultivate moral character. This notion, formulated in full by Friedrich Gedike in the late eighteenth century, proved resilient and shaped Swedish educational policies for much of the century. Yet Gedike was never identified as the source, not by his contemporaries nor by later historians. Moreover, the questions of how, when and why this knowledge appeared in Sweden and how it became part of a general consensus have never been explored. In this essay, it is argued that an important node of circulation between Germany and Sweden was influential educator Carl Ulric Broocman and that the concept of circulation offers a means of revealing previously obscured patterns of knowledge.