Outlines of Educational Doctrine

by Johann Friedrich Herbart

[261.] Elementary statics and mechanics will serve as an early introduction to physics, which combines with the easiest portions of chemistry. Long before physics is formally presented, it must be foreshadowed by many things stimulating the attention. Notice is directed to clocks, mills, the most familiar phenomena of atmospheric pressure, to electrical and magnetic toys, etc. In burgher schools, at least, so much must be said about buildings and machines as is necessary to incite to further study in the future. The same holds for the fundamental facts of physiology.

[262.] As often as a new topic for study is introduced, it is important to give prominence to some of the salient facts, and these must be accurately memorized. Moreover, pupils need to have practice in exact description. Where practicable, these descriptions are corrected by actually looking at the objects themselves.

Hasty and superficial observation of objects presented for inspection always calls for severe criticism; else collections and experiments become valueless. Nor should objects be shown too lavishly; pupils must often be told beforehand what they will have to look for. Frequently it may serve the purpose to employ successively good descriptions, pictures, and direct observation.

[ CHAPTER IV
Geography]

[263.] As to geography, at least two courses may be distinguished. One of these is analytic and begins with the pupil’s immediate neighborhood, the topography of the place, while the other starts with the globe. Here only the former will be discussed, as the latter can be had directly from good text-books.

Note.—The usual method of taking the globe as the point of departure would be less open to criticism, if, in order to render the conception of the earth’s sphericity more intelligible, attention were directed to the shape of the moon, the observation being carried on occasionally with the aid of a telescope. But even if this is done, it still remains a blunder to substitute the faint and vague idea of a huge ball for direct perception. Equally injudicious is the plan of beginning with Portugal and Spain. That spot where pupils and teacher are at the moment is the point from which the pupils must take their bearings, and in thought extend their horizon. It will never do to pass over the natural starting-points provided by sense-perception.

Had the note to this section been properly heeded, we should not have had to wait for fifty years after Herbart’s death before witnessing the present rational methods of applying geographical science to elementary education. It is the proud boast of the modern elementary geography that it begins with a study of the pupil’s actual environment. The term home geography has now become a familiar one. It signifies that the pupil is taught to observe the geographical elements as they exist in his own neighborhood. He studies hills, watercourses, soil, woods, lakes, together with the industrial phenomena that come within the reach of his investigation. Upon this primary sense-basis he rears the structure of his geographical knowledge.

[264.] Geography is an associating science, and use must be made of the opportunities it offers for binding together a variety of facts, none of which should be allowed to remain isolated in the mind of the learner. It is not the mathematical portion, supplemented and made interesting by popular astronomy, that serves as the first connecting link between mathematics and history (second course); even the rudiments of geography may, on the basis of observation exercises, furnish practice in the determination of triangles which occur on the first maps used, although this step is not always necessary when once some skill has been acquired in singling out features worthy of note. (The determination of position by latitude and longitude is, for the first course, as irrational as the action of a traveller in Germany or France would be if he set about to put together the picture of the places where he expects to remain, with the aid of their relation to the equator and the first meridian.)

Physical geography presupposes some knowledge of nature, and furnishes the occasion for enriching that knowledge. Political geography designates the manner in which man inhabits and uses the earth’s surface. It is the pedagogical aim of instruction in geography to associate all this.