Outlines of Educational Doctrine

by Johann Friedrich Herbart

Likewise in science, to study a typical form of life exhaustively by the comparative method gives one an insight into all related life, as well as many glimpses into physical and chemical science. In a large sense, therefore, we study all nature, whether we elect biology, physics, or chemistry, provided we use the comparative method of higher education. In the college or university, therefore, a large amount of election is justifiable. That would be a one-sided course which neglected entirely all social or all science studies.

[90.] Under favorable circumstances of time and opportunity, such as obtain in classical and other high schools, effort, as we know, is not restricted to the initial stimulation. Hence the question arises: In what sequence shall the aroused interests be further developed? Of instruction-material there is no lack; we must select and arrange, guided in the main by what was said on the conditions of many-sidedness and of interest. Thus to recapitulate: there must be progress from the simple to the more complex, and solicitous endeavor to make spontaneous interest possible. But in applying these principles we must not shut our eyes to the particular requirements and the difficulties in our way.

[91.] The empirical material of languages, history, geography, etc., calls for specific complications and series of ideas, together with the network of their interrelations. As to language, even words are complex wholes, made up of stems plus whatever elements enter into inflection and derivation, and further resolvable into single speech sounds. History has its time-series, geography its network of spatial relations. The psychological laws of reproduction determine the processes of memorizing and of retaining.

The mother-tongue serves as a medium through which foreign languages become intelligible, but at the same time offers resistance to the foreign sounds and constructions. Furthermore, it takes a young boy a long time to get familiar with the thought that far away in time and in space there have been and are human beings who spoke and speak languages other than his own, and about whom he need concern himself at all. Teachers, moreover, very commonly proceed on the fallacious and very mischievous assumption that, because their mode of expression is clear, it will, of course, be understood by the pupil. The resources of child-language increase but slowly. Such impediments as these must be removed. Geography extends the knowledge of spatial distances, but the inhabitant of a flat country lacks the sense-images of mountain ranges; one who grows up in a valley is without the sense-perception of a plain; the majority of pupils lack the concrete idea of an ocean. That the earth is a sphere revolving about its own axis and about the sun, for a long time sounds to children more like a fairy-tale than like a statement of fact; and even educated young men sometimes hesitate to accept the theory of the planetary system because they are unable to comprehend how it is possible to know such things. Difficulties of this kind must be met and not massed together unnecessarily.—For history, old ruins might serve as starting-points if only the material they furnish do not prove altogether too scanty and is not too recent, when the object is to take pupils at an early age into the times and places of Jewish, Greek, and Roman antiquity. Here the only satisfactory helps are stories that excite a very lively interest; these establish points of support for the realization in thought of a time long vanished. There is still lacking, however, a correct estimate of chronological distances down to our own time. This is attained only very gradually through the insertion of intermediate data.

[92.] Material for the exercise of reflection, and so for the excitation of speculative interest, is supplied by whatever in nature, in human affairs, in the structure of languages, and in religion, permits us to discover, or even merely to surmise, a connection according to general laws. But everywhere—the most common school studies, such as elementary arithmetic and grammar not excepted—the pupil encounters concepts, judgments, and inferences. But he clings to the particular, to the familiar, to the sensuous. The abstract is foreign to his mind; even the geometrical figures traced for the eye are to him particular things whose general significance he finds it hard to grasp. The general is to displace individual peculiarities in his thoughts; but in his habitual thought-series the well-known concrete crowds to the front. Of the general there remains in his mind almost nothing beyond the words used to designate it. Called upon to draw an inference, he loses one premise while pondering the next; the teacher is obliged to go back to the beginning again and again, to give examples, and from them lead up to generalizations; to separate and to connect concepts, and by degrees to bring the propositions closer to one another. When the middle terms and extremes have been successfully fused in the premises, they are still only loosely connected at first. The same propositions are repeatedly forgotten, and yet must not be reviewed too many times for fear of killing instead of quickening interest.

Since forgetting cannot be prevented, it is wise to abandon for a time a large portion of that into which pupils have gained an insight, but later on to go back to the essentials by other paths. The first preliminary exercises serve their purpose if the particulars are made to reveal the general before generalizations become the material for technical propositions, and before propositions are combined into inference-series. The processes of association ([69]) must not be omitted between the first pointing out of common features and the systematic teaching of their rational connections.

[93.] Æsthetic contemplation may, indeed, receive its impulse from many interests other than the æsthetic, as also from aroused emotions. Art itself, however, is possible only in a state of mind sufficiently tranquil to permit an accurate and coherent apprehension of the simultaneously beautiful, and to experience the mental activity corresponding to the successively beautiful. Æsthetic objects adapted to the pupil’s power of appreciation must be provided; but the teacher should refrain from forcing contemplation. He may, of course, repress unseemly manifestations, above all the damaging of objects possessing æsthetic value and entitled to respectful treatment. Frequently imitative attempts—although very crude at first—in drawing, singing, reading aloud, and, at a later period, in translating, are indications of æsthetic attention. Such efforts may be encouraged, but should not be praised. The genuine warmth of emotion, which in æsthetic culture kindles of itself, is easily vitiated by intensifying artifices. Excess of quantity is injurious. Works of art appealing to a higher state of culture must not be brought down to a lower plane. Art judgments and criticisms should not be obtruded.

[94.] The sympathetic interests depend still more on social intercourse and family life than the foregoing classes of interests do on experience in the world of sense. If the social environment changes frequently, children cannot become deeply attached anywhere. The mere change of teachers and of schools is fraught with harm. Pupils make comparisons in their own way; authority that is not permanent has little weight with them, whereas the impulse to throw off restraint gains in strength. Instruction is powerless to obviate such evils, especially since instruction itself must often change its form, thereby giving the impression of a real difference in teachers. This fact makes it all the more necessary that the instruction in history impart to pupils the glow of sympathy due to historical characters and events. For this reason—a reason of momentous significance to the whole process of education—history should not be made to present to pupils the appearance of a chronological skeleton. This rule should be observed with special care during the earlier lessons in history, since on these depends largely what sort of impression the whole subject will produce at a future time.

Of religious instruction, needless to say, we demand that it shall bring home to pupils the dependent condition of man, and we confidently expect that it will not leave their hearts cold. But historical instruction must coöperate with religious instruction, otherwise the truths of religion stand isolated, and there is ground for fearing that they will fail to enter as potent factors into the teaching and learning of the remaining subjects.