Throughout Addresses to the German Nation, J. G. Fichte develops an educational proposal that he promotes as the most viable political response to Germany’s social and economic problems. Conditioned by his fundamental work on human freedom, Fichte eschews institutional, external solutions to these issues, which he sees as necessarily limited, in favor of an approach from within. In this article, we first reconstruct his proposal, and in a second step we mobilize his arguments in order to understand the limits of the recognition paradigm in critical theory, namely the work of Axel Honneth and Emmanuel Renault. This reveals the possibility of an educational approach based on this paradigm. Finally, a discussion on the interface between individual emancipation and social harmony allows us to compare the core elements of these two educational approaches.