APPERCEPTION

(Bigge and Shermis 1999, 33‑42)

 

 StudyNotes

 

1. The third major outlook towardlearning – apperception is far more complicated than either mentaldiscipline or learning as unfoldment. Apperception is idea‑centeredlearning.

 

 

 

 

 

2. Adherents of both mentaldiscipline and natural unfoldment either assume or imply the existence of an inbornhuman nature, some aspects of which are common to all people. Although, intheir treatment of learning, supporters of both theories sharply differ fromone another, they agree that

the "furniture of minds"is innate.

 

·       Whereas romantic naturalists in their emphasis uponnatural unfoldment have expounded instinctive spontaneous development ofpersons, mental disciplinarians often agree that knowledge is inborn but insistthat students need expert help to enable them to recall it.

 

 

 

3. Apperception, in contrast to bothmental discipline and natural unfoldment, is a dynamic mental associationismbased upon the fundamental premise that

 

·       there are noinnate ideas;

·       everythingone knows comes to one from outside oneself.

 

 

4. This means that mind is  wholly a matter of content -- a compound of elementalimpressions bound together by association and formed when subject matter ispresented from without and makes certain associations or connections with priorcontent of the mind.

 

5. An association is anygeneral psychological concept within which it is assumed that the process oflearning is one of combining irreducible elements and that, in recall, weconnect ideas or actions simply because they were connected in our earlierexperiences with them. There are two broad types of associationisms:

 

·      early mentalistic associationisms, such asapperception, which focus upon the association of ideas in a mind, and

 

·       more modem physicalisticstimulus‑response associationisms, which focus upon formation ofconnections, either between cells in a brain and peripheral nervous system orbetween organic responses and environmental stimuli.

 

6. Themethod of studying human beings within a framework of associationism isanalytic or

reductionistic.                                                                

 

·      learnings are reduced to their component structural parts.

·      The basic elements that are associated may be mental,physical, or a combination of both.

 

But in apperception, theassociated elements are completely mental and constitute the structures ofminds. Hence, whereas mental discipline implies that a mind Is a substance,apperception implies that it is a structure.

 

HOW DIDAPPERCEPTION DEVELOP

 

7. Thethinking that underlies modern associationism, goes back to Aristotle, who in thefourth

century B.C.observed that

 

·      recollection of an item of knowledge was facilitatedby a person's associating that item or idea with another when the personlearned it.

 

Aristotlemaintained that four kinds of connections or associations would aid orstrengthen memory:

 

·       contiguityof one idea with another,

·       successionof ideas in a series,

·       similarityof ideas, and

·       contrast ofideas.

 

8.  Contiguity means "being together." If children aretold about Eskimos and igloos at the same time, future mention of Eskimo will help themrecall igloo. "A tiger is a big kitty" uses the principle ofsimilarity. If children learn that pleasure is the opposite of pain (contrast), mention ofpain will aid them in thinking of pleasure.

 

 

 

9. In the seventeenth century John Locke (1632‑1704) challengedthe whole notion of innate

faculties or ideas andwith it the conception of learning as a development of innate potentialities orfaculties. He replaced this notion with the idea that learning consists of persons gaining ideas in originallyempty minds.

 

 

10. Lockeobserved that he could find no common human nature at all. Realizing that hecould find no ideas common to all people in any one society or to people indifferent societies, he developed his tabula rasa theory of thehuman mind.

 

11.Tabula rasa, a "blank tablet" means that there are no innate ideas.Locke was convinced that not only was a mind empty at birth but also any ideasthat one holds must have come to one originally.

 

12. Locke’stheory that all of one's ideas must come to that person through the senses iscalled empiricism.

 

13. Locke'sempiricism was directly opposed to the earlier rationalism of Plato and Locke'simmediate forerunner, Rene Descartes (1596‑1650). Whereas these twoscholars

considered reason the source of knowledge, Locke insisted that knowledgewas derived from sense experience. In his view, perception is synonymous withlearning and is a product of sensory experience.

 

14. Whereas Plato thought thatindividuals may, through mental training, apprehend ultimate reality consistingof ideas or forms, Locke thought that sensationsimpinging upon minds gave rise to ideas.

 

15.Therefore, a mind has no directcontact with objects; only ideas of object are perceived.

 

16. For Locke, ideas were the unitsof a mind, and associations consisted of combinations of ideas, which wereeither simple or complex.

 

·       One of theoperations of a mind was thought to be a compounding of complex ideas from simpleones. This notion of mental combination and analysis was mental chemistry, "whichlater characterized apperception.

 

17. To allowfor associations within a mind, Locke recognized an "internal sense."He realized that if a mind were only a passive receptacle of sense impressions(which basically he thought it to be) the impressions would accumulate in adisorderly manner. Consequently, he gave mind a means for dealing with passiveimpressions once they were in.

 

 

·      Tomind, he attributed the ability to compare impressions, generalize then anddiscriminate between them, meaning that it could associate ideas throughcontiguity, similarity, and contrast.

 

18. Locke's writings spearheaded a shiftin the conception of education from mental discipline to habit formation.

 

·     His tabula rasa theory implied that the originalnature of human beings is neither morally good nor bad, nor actionally active.

·      Instead, it is deemed morally neutral and actionallypassive.

·      Thus, a mind is the product of life experiences.

 

19. Locke's thinking opened the wayfor psychologists to place their emphasis upon environmental nurture ratherthan upon hereditary nature.

 

·       In school,this meant that teachers were to be the architectsand builders of minds of children and youths.

·       they were to develop a systematicinstructional program centered in procedures designed to form proper habits instudents.

·       Teaching, then, became amatter of stimulating the senses as opposed to training the mental faculties.

 

 

20. Locke's work constituted aturning point in professional thinking about learning. Upto the seventeenth century most psychological thinking consisted ofrestatements and reinterpretations of the psychology of antiquity‑‑mentaldiscipline. "

 

21. This trend continued into theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but simultaneously, Locke spearheadedmodem associationism -‑ a new line of thought in regard to learning

.                                                     0,

 

WHAT IS HERBARTS APPERCEPTION THEORYOF LEARNING?

 

22. Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776‑1841)developed the first modem systematic psychology of learning to emerge from atabula rasa theory of mind.

 

·      Herbart was an eminent German philosopher‑psychologistand a skillful teacher. I

·      n 1809 he succeeded Immanuel Kant in the world's mostdistinguished chair of philosophy at Konigsberg, Germany, and held it until1833.

·      His speculative thinking developed from his dealingwith problems of education.

 

 

23. To Herbart. morality was thesupreme objective of education, he wanted to make childrengood. Thus. he developed a psychology to achieve this goal.

 

24. WhereasLocke and other early associationists had assumed that linkages or associationsare passive in nature, Herbart's apperception theoryreplaced this passivity with dynamic ideas.

 

25. However,in Herbart's apperception, ideas, notpersons, are dynamic. Personsare passive containers within which laws of mentalchemistry operate.

 

26. Herbart's influence on twentieth‑century Americaneducation has been great. Although this theory was developed early in thenineteenth century, it did not reach the United States until the l880s, whenfour young American -- Charles DeGarmo, Frank McMurry, Charles A. McMurry, and CharlesC. Van Liew -- studied at the University of Jena and returned to the UnitedStates to spread Herbartian doctrine with religious fervor.

 

 

 

27. From theearly years of the twentieth century to the time its tenets were seriouslychallenged by behaviorism, Herbartianism dominated teacher educationinstitutions in the United States.

 

Thus,if one is to comprehend the psychological atmosphere of today's schools, it isessential that one understand the development, principles, and implications ofthe theory of apperception.

 

28. Today,one seldom meets an avowed Herbartian; however, much of what occurs in ourschools carries with it the implicit assumption that theneutral and passive minds of children are being filled.

 

29. Althoughapperceptive teaching seldom is advocated as such in teacher educationinstitutions, much actual teaching continues tofollow a pattern much in harmony with the theory of apperception.

 

30. Herbart perpetuated a mind‑body dualism that wasprevalent in his time. This was a psychophysical parallelism within which thepsychic aspect – mind -- played the major role, particularly in the learningprocess.

 

0

 

 

 

·       Psychophysicalparallelism is a theory of mind and body according towhich, for every variation in conscious or mental process, there is aconcomitant, parallel neurological or body process.

 

Yet there is no causal relationbetween a person's body and mind.

 

31. Throughthe use of the concepts presentations,mental states, apperception, and apperceptive mass,Herbart expanded the notion of a mind's neutral passivity into a systematictheory of learning and teaching

 

·      He thought that a mind had no innate natural facultiesor talents whatsoever for receiving or producing ideas and that not even anyremote dispositions toward perception. thought, willing or action lay withinit.

·      He regarded a mind as nothing more than abattleground and storehouse of ideas.

·       Ideas, hethought, had an active quality. They could lead a life of their own in a mind,which was completely passive

·       A mind wasan aggregate not of faculties, but of ideas or mental states.

 

32.Herbart's ambition was to build a science of human minds that would parallelthe physical and

biological sciences.

 

 

 

33. SinceHerbart thought of psychology as "mental chemistry," he felt that thechief role of

psychology was to study the variousbleedings and amalgamations of ideas or mental states in minds.

 

·       Discoveryof the principles by which ideas combine and recombine like chemical elementswas Herbart's object in psychological investigation.

 

34. AlthoughHerbart felt that his psychology was scientific, probably most experimental psychologiststoday would not agree;                         

 

·       herejected experimentation and the use of physiological data, both of which havebeen cornerstones of twentieth‑century behavioristic psychology.

·       Tohim, observation and thought were the proper methods for psychological inquiry.

·       Furthermore,the observation he had in mind was self‑observation‑introspection.By looking into his own mind, Herbart thought that its "chemistry"could be observed and described.

 

He felt that it was proper that ascience like physics was experimental, but that, equally appropriate, the"science" of psychology should be metaphysical and introspective.

 

HOW DOESAPPERCEPTION WORK?

 

34. Herbartused the German term Vorstellungento name the mental elements which he deemed

theconstituent parts of a mind.

 

·       Vorstellungenmay be translated to mean presentations, mentalstates, or ideas.

·       Accordingto Herbartian psychologists, mental states constitute a nonspatial, mentalreality that is experienced firsthand and stored in the subconscious mind. Theyhave three forms

o      senseimpressions,

o      imagesor copies of previous sense impressions, and

o      affectiveelements such as pleasure and pain.

 

·       Such mentalstates furnish the total source of mental activity. The derived states, feelingand willing, are secondary factors that accompany mental states but are not asource or cause of mental activity. Thus, volitional willing has its roots inthought; right thinking produces right

actions.

 

35. Mind is anaggregate of mental states, and a person's stock of mental states at any giventime is his "apperceptive mass."

 

·       Untila first presentation occurs,there is nothing whatever present in a mind; except for its inherent receptivity,it is completely passive

·       Mentalstates, the active structural parts of a mind, become associatedto produce experience.

·       Thus,new ideas are learned only as they are related to what is already in an apperceptivemass.

 

·       Hence,it is the addition of new mental states to the old ones that produces thevarious types of mental processes.

 

·       Furthermore,the particular combination of ideas that is predominant at any given timedetermines what will hold a person's attention at that time.

 

36. InHerbart's system of "mental chemistry," every mental state has an inherent quality, giving it

an affinity for certain other mental states and an aversion for some others; respective ideas eitherattract or repel one another. Whereas the ideas of "book" and"school" would have an affinity and attract each other, the ideas of"book" and "fishing rod" would have a repugnancy and repelone another.

 

37. A Herbartian regards a mind as a battleground of contendingideas. Each idea in the mind of a person has once been in the center ofthe person's consciousness and strives to return, seeking self‑preservation

 

38. Furthermore, it tries to enter into relations with otherideas. Having once held the center of consciousness and subsequently lost it,each idea, like a deposed king, keeps trying to occupy the throne once aaaln.Compatible ideas may operate as teams, helping each other to remain in aconscious mind. But when two ideas are incompatible, one is likely to besubmerged.

 

39.ToHerbartians, all perception is apperception; itis a process of new ideas relating themselves to the store of old mentalstates.

 

·       Amind is like an iceberg in that most of it is submerged below the level ofconsciousness.

·       Memoriesstored in the subconscious enable one to interpret experience of the moment.

·       Withouta background of experience, any new sensation would mean almost nothing at all.

 

 

 

 

40. In picturing, a mind, Herbartintroduced the idea of threshold ofconsciousness.

 

·       Objectsoccupying consciousness are constantly changing

·       At anymoment, several ideas may occupy the consciousness,

·       However, onewill be at the focus of attention, some will be sinking below the threshold,and others will be striving to rise into consciousness.

 

41. The subconscious aspect of mind‑apperceptivemass‑‑contains the store of perceptions and images that have beenaccumulated during all past experiences of an individual.

 

·      Any of these ideas are ready to spring back intoconsciousness whenever a propitious opportunity occurs.

·      The content of consciousness at any moment is theresult of an interplay of many ideas.

 

42.Apperception is a process not only of a person becoming consciously aware of anidea but also of the idea's assimilation into a totality of conscious ideas.


 

 

 

 43. Within the apperceptive processHerbart saw the principles of frequency and association in operation.

·       Theprinciple of frequency means that the more often an idea or concept hasrisen into consciousness, the easier its return becomes.

·       Theprinciple of association holds that when a number of presentations orideas associate, or form a mass, the combined powers of the mass determine theideas that will enter consciousness.

 

44. Herbartrecognized three levels or stages of learning:

 

·       thestage of predominantly sense activity; followed by

·       thestage of memory, characterized by exact reproductions of previously formedideas; and

·       thehighest level, that of conceptual thinking or understanding.

 

Understandingoccurs when the common, or shared, attributes of a series of ideas make themselvesseen. It involves generalization‑deriving rules, principles, or laws froma group of specifics.

 

WHAT DOES APPERCEPTION MEAN FORTEACHING?

 

45.According to apperception, rightthinking will produce right action; volition or willing has its roots in thought.

 

 

·       Ifa teacher builds up the right sequence of the right conduct follows.

·       Hence,the real work of instruction is implantation not only of knowledge but also ofinner volitions or will by means of presented ideas.

·       Psychologically,students' mentalities are determined by the kind of ideas that are presented tothem from without.

 

46. Since, in apperception, there is no substantive mind tobe trained, it can no longer be said that learning is a matter of discipliningor training a mind; rather, learning is the formation of the apperceptive massthat constitutes a mind.

 

47. Thus, the task of education isto cause present appropriate experiences to combine with an achievedbackground. The problem of education, then, is to selectthe right materials for formina the backarounds or apperceptive masses ofstudents. Teachers must start with the experiences that pupils already havehad and then enlarge and enrich these experiences.

 

WHAT ARETHE HERBARTIAN FIVE STEPS IN TEACHING AND

LEARNING?

 

48. Herbartand his followers were convinced that the learning process proceeds through an

orderedseries of steps that a teacher should understand and follow. Accordingly,effective teaching

requiresthat regardless of obstacles, the proper succession of steps be pursued.

                                                                        I

 

 

49. Herbart's four steps,clearness, association, system, and method, were expanded to five byAmerican Herbartians. Clearness became (1) preparation and (2) presentation;association became (3) comparison and abstraction; system became (4)generalization; and method became (5) application.

 

·      Use of these steps came to be regarded as the generalmethod to be followed in all teaching.

·      The steps may be demonstrated by the followingexample, which involves a teacher teaching students the generalization that anyobject will float in liquid or in air if it weighs less than an equal volume ofthe liquid or air in which it is suspended.

 

Preparation.To bring relevant ideas into consciousness the teacherreminds students of certain experiences they have had with floating objects.The students will recall the floating of boats, balloons, bubbles, and thelike.

 

Presentation.The teacher presents new facts about floating, perhaps through means of

demonstrations.For example, the teacher might demonstrate how oil floats on water or how asteel ball will float on mercury.

 

Comparisonand Abstraction. If the teacher has performed the first two stepsproperly, students will see that the new facts have similarities with thosealready known. Hence, in the students' consciousness, the new and old ideasassociate; they are welded together because of theirnatural affinity for each other. At this point, students should also see thenature of the common elements that give the two sets of facts their mutualattractiveness. Sorting out this common element is what is meant byabstraction.

 

Generalization.In this step, students attempt to name the common elements of the twosets of facts as a principle or generalization. They arrive at theprinciple of flotation which was the stated objective of this instruction.

 

Application.The newly learned principle is then used to explain further facts orsolve problems relatin‑ to flotation. This is done throuah assigned tasksor problems. The teacher might ask students to explain why boatscan be made successfully from steel, or give them a problem that requires themto determine whether a certain object would float in a certain medium. Forexample, the teacher might ask, "Given a freight barge of specified weightand displacement, how much weight could be placed in it without causing it tosink?"