Johann Friedrich Herbart
born May 4, 1776, Oldenburg
died Aug. 14, 1841, Göttingen, Hanover
German philosopher and educator, who led the renewed
19th-century interest in Realism and is considered among the
founders of modern scientific pedagogy.
After studying under Johann Gottlieb Fichte at Jena (1794),
Herbart worked as a tutor at Interlaken, Switz., from 1797 to
1800, during which period he made the acquaintance of
Pestalozzi. Becoming a licentiate of the University of Göttingen
in 1802, he was appointed extraordinary professor there in 1805.
At the close of 1808 he became Kant’s successor as professor at
Königsberg. There he also conducted a seminary of pedagogy until
1833, when he returned as professor of philosophy to Göttingen,
where he remained until his death.
Herbart’s position in the history of philosophy is due mainly
to his contributions to the philosophy of mind. His aims in this
respect are expressed by the title of his textbook—Psychologie
als Wissenschaft neu gegrundet auf Erfahrung, Metaphysik, und
Mathematik, 2 vol. (1824–25; “Psychology As Knowledge Newly
Founded on Experience, Metaphysics, and Mathematics”); of
central importance is the inclusion of Mathematik. He rejected
the whole concept of faculties (in Kantian terms) and regarded
mental life as the manifestation of elementary sensory units or
“presentations” (Vorstellungen). These he conceived as mental
forces rather than as mere “ideas” in Locke’s sense. The study
of their interactions gave rise to a statics and dynamics of the
mind, to be expressed in mathematical formulas like those of
Newtonian mechanics. Ideas need not be conscious; and they might
either combine to produce composite resultants or conflict with
one another so that some get temporarily inhibited or repressed
“below the threshold of consciousness.” An organized but
unconscious system of associated ideas formed an “apperception
mass”; such a system could apperceive a new presentation and
thus give it richer meaning. On this basis Herbart developed a
theory of education as a branch of applied psychology.
His theory of education—known as Herbartianism—was set out
principally in two works, Pestalozzis Idee eines A B C der
Anschauung (1802; “Pestalozzi’s Idea of an A B C of Sense
Perception”) and Allgemeine Pädagogik (1806; “Universal
Pedagogy”), which advocated five formal steps in teaching: (1)
preparation, a process of relating new material to be learned to
relevant past ideas or memories in order to give the pupil a
vital interest in the topic under consideration; (2)
presentation, presenting new material by means of concrete
objects or actual experience; (3) association, thorough
assimilation of the new idea through comparison with former
ideas and consideration of their similarities and differences in
order to implant the new idea in the mind; (4) generalization, a
procedure especially important to the instruction of adolescents
and designed to develop the mind beyond the level of perception
and the concrete; and (5) application, using acquired knowledge
not in a purely utilitarian way, but so that every learned idea
becomes a part of the functional mind and an aid to a clear,
vital interpretation of life. This step is presumed possible
only if the student immediately applies the new idea, making it
his own.
Herbart maintained that a science of education was possible,
and he furthered the idea that education should be a subject for
university study. His ideas took firm hold in Germany in the
1860s and spread also to the United States. By the turn of the
century, however, the five steps had degenerated to a mechanical
formalism, and the ideas behind them were replaced by new
pedagogical theories, in particular those of John Dewey.
