Parents and children

by Charlotte M. Mason

CHAPTER XXI

HERBARTIAN PEDAGOGICS

We in England require, every now and then, to pull ourselves together, and to ask what they are doing on the continent in the way of education. We still hark back to the older German educational reformers. We may not know much of Comenius, Basedow, Ratich; we do know something of the reformers next in descent, Pestalozzi and Froebel; but how much do we know of the thought of Johann Friedrich Herbart, the lineal successor of these, who has largely displaced his predecessors in the field of Pedagogics.

How entirely German educators work upon Herbart, and Herbart only, is proved by the existence of a Herbartian educational literature greatly more extensive than the whole of our English educational literature put together.

A little volume on the “Outlines of Pedagogics,”[16] by Professor W. Rein, of the University of Jena, is offered to us by the translators, C. C. and Ida J. Van Liew, as a brief introduction to the study of Herbart and his school, the author making due allowance for the advances that have been made in the fifty years that have elapsed since Herbart’s death.

As Herbart and his interpreters represent the most advanced school of educational thought on the continent, it will, perhaps, be interesting to our readers to make a slight comparison between what we call P.N.E.U. Philosophy and the school of thought which exercises such immense influence in Germany.

One of the most characteristic features of Herbart’s thinking, and that feature of it which constitutes a new school of educational thought, is, that he rejects the notion of separate mental faculties. The earlier reformers, notably Pestalozzi and Froebel, divide the faculties up with something of the precision of a phrenologist, and a chief business of education is, according to them, “to develop the faculties.” There is a certain pleasing neatness in this idea which is very attractive. We want to know, definitely, what we have to do. Why develop the perceptive faculties here, the conceptive there, the judgment in this lesson, the affections in the other, until you have covered the whole ground, giving each so-called faculty its due share of developmental exercise! But, says Herbart, we have changed all that. The mind, like Wordsworth’s cloud, moves altogether when it moves at all.

Now this appears to be but a slight fundamental difference, but it is one upon the recognition of which education changes front. The whole system of beautifully organised lessons, whose object is to develop this or that, is called into question. For the raison d’être of specialised intellectual gymnastics is gone when we no longer recognise particular “muscles” of the mind to be developed. The aim of education must be something quite other, and, if the aim is other, the methods must be altered, for what is method but a way to an end. So far we are entirely with Herbart; we do not believe in the “faculties;” therefore we do not believe in the “development of the faculties;” therefore we do not regard lessons as instruments for this “development”: in fact, our whole method of procedure is altered.

Again, we are with the philosopher in his recognition of the force of an idea, and especially of those ideas which are, as we phrase it, in the air at any given moment. “Both the circle of the family and that of social intercourse are subjected to forces that are active in the entire social body, and that penetrate the entire atmosphere of human life in invisible channels. No one knows whence these currents, these ideas arise; but they are there. They influence the moods, the aspirations, and the inclinations of humanity, and no one however powerful can withdraw himself from their effects; no sovereign’s command makes its way into their depths. They are often born of a genius to be seized upon by the multitude that soon forgets their author; then the power of the thought that has thus become active in the masses again impels the individual to energetic resolutions: in this manner it is constantly describing a remarkable circle. Originating with those that are highly gifted, these thoughts permeate all society, reaching, in fact, not only its adult members, but also through these its youth, and appearing again in other highly gifted individuals in whom they will perhaps have been elevated to a definite form.

“Whether the power of these dominant ideas is greater in the individual, or in the body of individuals as a whole, is a matter of indifference here. Be that as it may, it cannot be denied that their effect upon the one is manifested in a reciprocal action upon the other, and that their influence upon the younger generation is indisputable.”