Johann Friedrich Herbart was a contemporary of Froebel and other German Romanticists, but he can hardly be put into the ranks of such pedagogues. During his lifetime his sober, systematic “philosophical realism” found little approval; only posthumously, during the latter half of the 19th century, did his work achieve great importance. He is regarded as one of the founders of theoretical pedagogy, injecting both metaphysics and psychology into the study of how people learn. As a young man of 18, Herbart had studied at the University of Jena under the idealist philosopher Fichte. It was a long while before he broke from the spell of Fichte’s teachings and turned to philosophical realism, which asserts that underlying the world of appearances there is a plurality of things or “reals.” Change consists simply in the alteration in the relations between these reals, which resist the changed relationships as a matter of self-preservation. Ideas, like things, always exist and always resist change and seek self-preservation. It is true that some ideas may be driven below the threshold of consciousness; but the excluded ideas continue to exist in an unconscious form and tend, ... (200 of 123,993 words)Herbart
The psychology and pedagogy of Herbart
Education
Written by Joseph Albert Lauwerys
Last Updated