Johann Friedrich Herbart
Study Notes
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The German educator and philosopher Johann Friedrich
Herbart, b. May 4, 1776, d. Aug. 14, 1841, was one of the founders of
modern scientific pedagogy. He taught at the universities of Gottingen
(1802-09, 1833-41) and Konigsberg (1809-33) and produced a large number
of works on pedagogy, psychology, and philosophy that had a substantial
impact upon the theory and practice of teaching in Europe and the United
States. He attacked the popular theory of faculty psychology, the belief
that the mind is composed of relatively independent faculties that can
be exercised and trained through the study of particular academic
subjects. Herbart was a pioneer in the development of a systematic
theory of learning and teaching based on a science of psychology.
According to his theory of apperception, new ideas, when properly
presented to the student, become linked to existing ideas and form a
system of associated ideas called the apperceptive mass.
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Johann Friedrich Herbart
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Herbart saw the teacher's essential task as identifying the
existing interests of the student and relating them to the great store
of human experience and culture in order to help the student become part
of civilized life. He also held that the ultimate goal of education was
the building of ethical character rather than the acquisition of
knowledge. After Herbart's death his philosophy was translated by his
disciples into a rigid set of rules and steps of instruction.
Herbartianism, the name of his disciples' pedagogical system, had a
powerful impact on teaching practice in the late 19th century,
especially in the United States. In its most widespread form, this
system included five formal steps in teaching: preparation,
presentation, association, generalization, and application.
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Influenced by Leibniz,
Kant, and Fichte, Herbart made many important contributions to psychology. In
1805 he lectured at Göttingen and from 1809 to 1833 held the chair of
philosophy at Königsberg. He then returned to Göttingen as professor of
philosophy. Psychologie als Wissenschaft (1824-25) was his major
psychological work and Allgemeine Metaphysik (1828-29) his most important
philosophical study. Herbart held that the concepts of change and becoming
harbored a contradiction that destroyed the reality of continuous identity. He
maintained that true being consists of a plurality of simple reals, which were
modeled after the Leibnizian monads. Change is nothing but alteration in the
various relationships among reals. The reactions of reals to these changing
relationships are their efforts at self-preservation, as in the case of the
soul, whose efforts are ideas. Ideas themselves strive for self-preservation,
each one having resistance to change. This makes possible mathematical treatment
of ideas and opens the way to scientific psychology. Though he denied the
possibility of psychological experiment, Herbart sought to develop the
mathematical and empirical, as well as the metaphysical, aspects of psychology.
In education he emphasized the importance of relating new concepts to the
experience of the learner so that there would be less resistance to apperception
of new ideas. He stressed the need for moral education through experience and
brought the work of teaching into the area of conscious method. Many of
Herbart's educational works have been translated into English.
See his Application of Psychology to the Science of Education (tr. 1892);
H. B. Dunkel, Herbart and Herbartianism (1970).
http://www.coe.ufl.edu/webtech/GreatIdeas/pages/peoplepage/herbart.htm
"Education is the methods by which a society gets from
one generation to the next. This includes knowledge, culture, and values.
Individually the student develops physically, mentally, emotionally, morally,
and socially."
Learning Theory - Apperception or Herbartianism -
Neutral-passive mind composed of mental states.
Herbart is acknowledged to be the “father of
scientific pedagogy.” An empiricist educator influenced by Immanuel Kant,
Herbart stressed the importance of the relevance of information to the learner.
Herbart's ideas stem from his analysis of experience. He believed that all
mental activities were the result of interactions of numerous elementary
ideas, rather than all concepts stemming from a one set of mental ideas which
was the predominant view of that time.
Herbart believed that educational methods should be based on psychology and
ethics: psychology to furnish necessary knowledge of the mind and ethics to be
used as a basis for determining the social ends of education. Herbart’s system
of philosophy and analysis of experience includes logic, metaphysics and
aesthetics as coordinate elements.
Herbart’s success in stressing the study of the psychological processes of
learning as a means of devising educational programs based on the aptitudes,
abilities, and interests of students led to their adoption in the
teacher-training systems of many countries.
Herbart and his followers designed a 5-step teaching method:
- Prepare the pupils to be ready for the new lesson.
- Present the new lesson.
- Associate the new lesson with ideas studied earlier.
- use examples to illustrate the lesson’s major points.
- Test pupils to ensure they had learned the new lesson.
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/Mind/EpistemologyoNS.html
Herbart concerned himself with quantitative relationships among
ideas. At
Königsberg, Herbart began work on his psychology, publishing his Lehrbuch
in 1816 and Psychologie als Wissenschaft in 1824/1825. As is
evident from this later title, Herbart believed that
psychology could be both empirical (although he denied the possibility of
experiment) and mathematical.
Arguing that ideas ("presentations") are
arrayed in time and vary in intensity, he attempted to create both a statics
and a dynamics of mind and employed complex mathematical equations to describe
an hypothesized system of principles of interaction among ideas.
Specifically, Herbart assumed that
- ideas of the same sort oppose one another while ideas of different sorts
do not.
- Opposition progressively weakens the original idea in consciousness and,
as a result, it eventually sinks below the threshold of awareness where it
remains until the appearance of a similar idea in experience causes the
original to rise at a speed proportional to the degree of similarity between
the two ideas.
- Furthermore, as the original is pulled up by the new idea, similar ideas
cling to it.
- Thus no idea can rise except to take its place in the unitary mass of
ideas already present in consciousness.
This is Herbart's famous concept of
"apperception" in which an idea is not only made conscious but
assimilated to the whole complex of conscious ideas, the apperceptive mass.
In these views, Herbart took several giant strides along the path that the
new scientific psychology would eventually follow toward a complex, carefully
worked out, quantitative recognition of the critical distinction between ideas
above and below the threshold of consciousness. As the received history
suggests, he was a transitional figure between Kant and Fechner; but in his
rejection of the possibility of experimental verification and his inability to
link his philosophy of mind to the physiology of the brain, he travelled only
part of the way toward the "new" psychology. Before psychology could
be taken into the laboratory, it needed methods; and the primary source of the
early methods lay not in the philosophy of mind, but in the work of
physiologists such as Purkyne and Weber, who made fundamental contributions to
the experimental phenomenology of sensation, and Müller, who elaborated the
doctrine of specific nerve energies that systematized the epistemological role
of the nervous system as intermediary between the mind and the world.
http://educ.southern.edu/tour/who/pioneers/herbart.html
Herbart's system of psychology concerned elementary bits of
experiences, sensations in our terminology, which combined to form ideas. Ideas,
he held, are the real contents of the mind. To this extent he followed the
British associationists. However, the mechanics of Newton and the theory of
ideas as activity of Leibniz supplied for him the means of making a substantial
modification of British associationism--the conceiving of ideas to be forces.
Ideas as combined according to British associationism did so in what he
conceived to be a relatively passive fashion. In this connection Herbart argued
that the associations with which the British associationists had dealt are in
reality much more complicated, digressive, and diversive than they had described
them to be.The associationists had assumed, implicitly or otherwise, only the
attraction of ideas without particular attention to the nature of the force
involved.
- Herbart postulated both attraction and repulsion of ideas,
particularly when ideas clash. Ideas become forces when they resist one
another.
- Some ideas do not resist one another, and for these
associations a conventional explanation is sufficient. These are the ideas
that are neither opposed nor contrasted with one another as a tone and a
color which unhindered form a complex.
- But there are other ideas which are contrasted, such as red
and yellow, which may become blended or fused but never form a complex.
- Sometimes ideas are so resistive as not to form even
loosely affiliated complexes.
- One idea may be so much a hindrance to another that the
second is not even available in consciousness.
- This hindered idea, although not in consciousness, still
exists. Inhibited though these ideas may be, they remained existent as
tendencies, although in a fashion that Herbart does not make clear. Ideas
may arrest, but they cannot destroy one another.
- When the hindrance is lifted, the idea will again appear in
consciousness.
This entering into consciousness requires the
conceptionalization of a threshold of consciousness. That is to say, the readily
verified subjective phenomena of thinking of something which was not in
consciousness a moment before, required, in the opinion of Herbart, that there
must be ‘a level below which an idea is unconscious and which must raise above
that level to become conscious. He also used this conception of threshold to
explain sleep. If only a few active ideas are present, we have dreaming; if all
active ideas are driven below the threshold, we have the unconsciousness that is
deep sleep.33' Herbart pointed out that since an idea, once created, is never
lost, this makes very remarkable a comparison of the paltriness of those ideas
of which a person is conscious at any given moment with the multitude of ideas
he may have potentially at his disposal. The explanation for this poverty of
ideas present in consciousness as contrasted to the wealth of tendencies
available lies in the threshold of consciousness. Besides those few grasped at a
given moment, a person can, by quick transition, bring in other ideas in complex
relations and modify them.
Some ideas move into consciousness relatively readily, others
do not. Submerged ideas move above the threshold to the full focus of attention
if they are consonant with the apperceptive mass or dominant system of ideas, a
conception derived from Leibniz. An idea that comes into consciousness combines
with the extant ideas to the extent that is congruent with those already in
consciousness. There is a unity of consciousness attention, as one might call
it-so that one cannot attend to two ideas at once except in so far as they will
unite into a single complex idea. When one idea is at the focus of the
consciousness it forces incongruous ideas into the background or out of
consciousness altogether. Combined ideas form wholes
and a combination of related ideas form an apperceptive mass, into which
relevant ideas are welcomed but irrelevant ones are excluded.
Ideas are active and may struggle with one another for a place
in consciousness; Herbart's concept of threshold and its correlary that there
are both conscious and unconscious mental processes are distinct advances over
earlier views. For example, Herbart gave psychology the beginning of a theory of
inhibition, or interference in learning, which was to reappear in many guises
and in theories in times to come extending from Pavlov's "conditioned
reflex" to Freud's "repression." However, his contribution in
this area should not be overestimated. Darwinism, medical psychology, and
psychiatry contributed much more than did Herbart to the understanding of the
dynamics of unconscious processes. The concept of psychology as a science had
begun to take form with Herbart's claim that it was mathematical, but use of the
experimental method, basic to the science, had yet to be worked out. Despite
.the sterility of Herbart's calculus of the mind, it encouraged Fechner, who
combined the Herbartian emphasis upon mathematics with Weber's use of
experiment.
Herbart did much to make clear that psychology was crucial for
educational theory and practice. It was his theory of apperception that had the
most direct and influential application to education. As has already been seen
it was on the background of previous experience that a new idea was assimilated
in the apperceptive mass. If information is to be acquired as easily and as
rapidly as possible, it follows that in teaching one should introduce new
material by building upon the apperceptive mass of already familiar ideas.
Relevant ideas, then, will be most easily assimilated to the apperceptive mass,
while irrelevant ideas will tend to be resisted and, consequently, will not be
assimilated as readily. This reasoning eventually led educators to adopt the
practice of planning lessons so that the pupil passed from already familiar to
closely related unfamiliar elements. Herbart's work35 was also influential in
exposing the shallowness and sterility of a faculty psychology which was so
prevalent during this time.