Herbart: Systematizing Teaching
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4-4 Herbart: Systematizing Teaching Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), a German professor of philosophy and psychology, devised an educational method that systematized instruction and encouraged students’ moral development. In particular, he used history and literature to construct networks of ideas in students’ minds.14
4-4a Principles of Teaching and Learning Herbart defined interest as a person’s ability to focus on and retain an idea in consciousness. He reasoned that a large mass or network of ideas would generate a great number of interests. Ideas related to each other formed a network, or what he termed an “apperceptive mass,” in the mind. Herbart advised teachers to introduce students to an increasing number of ideas and to draw relationships between them. Concerned with students’ character education, Herbart emphasized the humanities, especially history and literature as rich sources of moral values. By studying the lives of great men and women, students could discover how people made their defining moral decisions. Literature provided a framework for placing values into a humanistic perspective. Herbart was influential in bringing history and literature into the secondary-school curriculum at a time when it was dominated by the classical Greek and Latin languages.
4-4b Education and Schooling Seeking to systematize teaching, Herbart structured instruction into a precise sequence of five steps:
1. Preparation, in which teachers encourage readiness in students to receive the new concept or material they are planning to introduce
2. Presentation, in which teachers clearly identify and present the new concept
For a biography and excerpts from Herbart’s Outlines of Educational Doctrine, see Madonna M. Murphy, The History and Philosophy of Education: Voices of Educational Pioneers (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Merrill/Prentice Hall, 2006), pp. 194–201. Also, see Andrea R. English, Discontinuity in Education: Dewey, Herbart, and Education as Transformation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
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1797–1800 Tutor at Interlaken, Switzerland; confers with Pestalozzi 1805 Professor of Philosophy at University of Göttingen 1806 Publishes Universal Pedagogy 1808 Professor of Philosophy at University of Königsberg
1835 Professor again at Göttingen 1841 Death
1800 1820 1840 1860 1880 1825 Publishes Psychology as Knowledge Newly Founded on Experience, Metaphysics, and Mathematics
1895 National Herbart Society established in United States
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