1. WESTERN UNIVERSITY
School of Arts, Humanities, and Languages
Subject: Foundation of Education
Lecturer: SoeungSopha
Herbart: Systematizing Teaching
Submitted by: Chan Rannkiry
2013-2014

2. Background
Johann Friedrich Herbart was born on May 4, 1776 and died on August 14, 1841
in Gottingen, Hanover. He is a German philosopher and educator, who led the
renewed 19th
-century interest in Realism and is considered among the founders
of modern scientific. After study 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 Gottingen in 1802, he was appointed extraordinary professor there
in 1805. At the close of 1808 he became Kant’s successor as professor at
Konigsberg. There he also conducted a seminary of pedagogy until 1833, when
he returned as professor of philosophy to Gottingen, where he remained until his
death.
Herbart’s position in the history of philosophy is due mainly to his contributions
to the philosophy ofmind. His aims in this respect are expressed by the title of
his textbook“Psychology As KnowledgeNewly Founded on Experience,
Metaphysics, and Mathematics” 2 vol. of central importance is the inclusion of
Mathematic. He rejected the whole concept of faculties in Kantian terms and
regarded mental lifeas the manifestation of elementary sensory units or
“presentations”.These heconceived as mental forces rather than as mere
“ideas” in Locke’s sense. The study of their interactionsgave 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 producecomposite 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
ideasformed an “apperception mass”; such a system could apperceive a new
presentation and thus give itricher meaning. On this basis Herbart developed a
theory of education as a branch of appliedpsychology.

3. Theory of Herbart
His theory of education was known as Herbartianismwas set out principally in
two works, “Pestalozzi’s Idea of an A B C of Sense Perception”and “Universal
Pedagogy”, which advocated five formal steps in teaching, preparation, a
process of relating new material to be learned to relevant past ideas or memories
inorder to give the pupil a vital interest in the topic under consideration;
presentation, presentingnew material by means of concrete objects or actual
experience; association, thorough assimilationof the new idea through
comparison with former ideas and consideration of their similarities
anddifferences in order to implant the new idea in the mind; generalization, a
procedure especiallyimportant to the instruction of adolescents and designed to
develop the mind beyond the level ofperception and the concrete; and
application, using acquired knowledge not in a purely utilitarianway, but so that
every learned idea becomes a part of the functional mind and an aid to a clear,
vitalinterpretation of life. This step is presumed possible only if the student
immediately applies the newidea, making it his own.
Herbart maintained that a science of education was possible, and he furthered
the idea that educationshould 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 werereplaced by new pedagogical
theories, in particular those of John Dewey.