JOHANN FRIEDRICH HERBART
(1776-1841)
Pestalozzi found the most original successor of his educational reform
in the intuitive mind of Froebel; the work of education as a benevolent
and intelligent assistance to the natural evolution of the child-soul
was carried on further by the latter. But the successor most competent
to systematize and complete his pedagogical ideas was found in the
analytical mind of Herbart; Pestalozzi’s innovations in the field of
elementary instruction underwent a careful working over by this keen
and comprehensive intellect of thorough academic training. To bring
about psychological unity and sequence in school instruction was one
of the life aims of Froebel, but he stopped short at the kindergarten,
and, moreover, left us no scientific theory. Herbart, on the contrary,
not only aimed at the same, but worked out a system on the broadest
scientific and philosophic basis which his age permitted him. According
to Herbart, “to discover this sequence is Pestalozzi’s chief effort and
likewise my own great ideal.” He found the solution in the principle
of the A. B. C. of perception, “that grand idea of its discoverer,
the noble Pestalozzi,” as he called it. But “Pestalozzi has only
worked out the application of the principle within the narrow sphere
of elementary instruction. It belongs, in truth, to education as a
whole, though it needs for that a further development” (6: p. 178).
This Pestalozzian principle, interpreted by Herbart, probably means the
systematic building up of the entire mental mechanism of the pupil from
its simplest and fundamental elements or constituents, in the necessary
psychological order and with mathematical exactness.
These two German educators, Froebel and Herbart, who both may be called
the contemporary disciples of the great Swiss reformer, have much in
common in their pedagogical ideas, but they were totally different in
temperament, training, metaphysical conceptions, and practical careers.
They do not seem even to have known each other. Herbart reminds me,
more than anyone else, of Kant, of whom he was a great admirer and
to whom he seems to owe much. In his rather stoical physiognomy,
in his perfect poise and well-balanced personality, in his sharp
analytic intellect, in his instinct for schematic systematization and
elaboration, in his comprehensive, all-sided view of problems, in
his scholarly sincerity, in his combination of speculativeness and
empiricism, of theoretical and practical interest, he is the second
Kant in the history of philosophy. There is a still more interesting
comparison. As Kant endeavored to clear away all the one-sided
dogmatic views of preceding metaphysics by the standard of his
analytic epistemology and to establish in their place a new system of
philosophy, upon the unshakable basis of the _a priori_ categories
of knowledge, so Herbart tried the same in the field of pedagogy, using
his analytical psychology as the dissecting knife for the “vulgar”
theories of his forerunners and the basis of his own “scientific”
pedagogy. “The _a priori_ possibility of all the activities of the
human mind” shows him the only means of promoting the aims and removing
the hindrances of education. All the educational ideals, theories, and
practices, however beautiful and ingenious they sound, must be judged
by this standard. If Kant’s philosophy is the critical philosophy,
Herbart’s pedagogy is the critical pedagogy. And if Kant, coming after
Rousseau, succeeded in opening a new era in the schoolmen’s philosophy,
so Herbart was an epoch-maker in the history of the schoolmen’s
pedagogy. But the name of the father of modern education will ever
remain Pestalozzi, as the honor of the creator of modern tendencies of
thought will be conferred upon Rousseau instead of Kant, if one looks
at things from a broad, human, cultural standpoint rather than the
narrow, academic one.
Kant saw the necessity and possibility of scientific pedagogy, and
had an unrealized dream of establishing a pedagogical system as the
culmination of all the philosophical branches. This, Herbart worked
at with painstaking effort, and thought he succeeded in it. Professor
Rein is justified in saying that, “without doubt, Herbart, among all
German philosophers, made the greatest and most thorough investigation
in this field.... He is the only one among the original thinkers of
modern times who not merely casually touched, but directed the whole
force of his theoretical and practical knowledge upon the question of
pedagogy” (16: p. 462). Kant recommends, in his pedagogical lectures,
the establishment of experimental schools for the advancement of
educational art. Herbart realized the idea by organizing a pedagogical
seminary with a practice school in connection with the University
of Königsberg, where he was invited in 1809 to fill the chair once
occupied by Kant, and long desired by him. And to-day we see, thanks
to this impetus, similar institutes established in many German
universities.
A German writer has called Pestalozzi the Kant of pedagogy and
didactics, but to me no one seems better to suit the name than
our philosopher-pedagogist. But we must not overlook an important
difference which exists between the two philosophers: Kant stood
more under the influence of natural science, while Herbart remained
more under the influence of the classics. So the former is the more
naturalistic, and the latter more humanistic, in his educational
standpoint. This may be partly due to the difference of the times in
which they lived, partly to that of their training, and also of their
personalities. While they resemble each other in their intellectuality,
there seems to be more iron in Kant and more warmth in Herbart;
certainly the latter had more appreciation of the æsthetic aspect of
things than the former.
No education without instruction, no instruction without education,
is the keynote of the whole Herbartian pedagogy. From Locke down,
the essential trend of educational reforms has been in the direction
of exalting discipline and training, natural growth and experience,
thrusting instruction into the background. Not knowledge, not
intellect, but the virtues, character, will, heart, man himself,
was the fundamental aim of education, and instruction was accounted
as only contributing to it in a secondary or tertiary way. Herbart
agreed with his predecessors in seeing the main purpose of education
in the formation of character; but, according to him, instruction
was the chief means for attaining this end, and consequently it was
the essential business of educators. To him, “to present the whole
treasure of accumulated research in a concentrated form to the youthful
generation is the highest service which mankind at any period of his
existence can render to his successors” (9: p. 81). And herein lies
the inspiration of the teacher’s calling. However, he regained this
importance for the function of instruction by giving it a higher
meaning than the mere imparting of miscellaneous knowledge. In order
to see this we must go a little into his psychology, upon which his
pedagogy rests.
The new departure which Herbart made in psychology was that he
dispersed the ghost of “faculties,” which had been attributed to an
entity called soul, and substituted in its place the manifold images
or representations as the phenomena of our psychic life. He argues:
“It is an error indeed to look upon the human soul as an aggregate of
all sorts of faculties” (8: p. 15). And to reduce these to one and the
same active principle is to make the theory still worse. “The soul is a
simple essence, not merely without parts, but also without any kind of
multiplicity in its quality” (11: p. 119).
“The soul has no innate dispositions (_Anlage_), nor faculties
(_Vermögen_) whatever, either for the purpose of receiving or
for the purpose of producing. It is, therefore, no _tabula rasa_
in the sense that impressions foreign to itself may be made upon it;
moreover, in the sense indicated by Leibnitz, it is not a substance
which includes within itself original self-activity. It has originally
neither concepts nor feelings nor desires. It knows nothing of itself
and nothing of other things; also in it lie no forms of perception
and thought, no laws of willing and action, and not even a remote
predisposition to any of these” (11: p. 120).
As to the metaphysical question, “What is the soul in its essence?”
Herbart endeavors to give no answer. It “is totally unknown, and will
forever remain so. It is as little an object of speculative as of
empirical psychology” (11: p. 120).
Now, soul is entirely deprived of all content, qualities, attributes,
and tendencies, and reduced to a sort of mathematical point, or
something like the Kantian _Ding-an-sich_. It is a “_Real_,”
he says. But its entity is equal to nonentity. A way is opened when he
tells that there is one original power possessed by the soul. This is
the reaction to external stimuli, or the power of “self-preservation,”
as he calls it. By this reaction representations are produced, and when
once produced they stay in the mind, ready to be reproduced and develop
through the process of mutual interaction into concepts and higher
forms of thought.
Thus, representations or ideas constitute the primary content of
soul. However, from the contrast or counter reactions of these ideas
there result secondary states, which are what we call feelings or
volitions. These three phases of our soul life--ideation, feeling, and
volition--“are constantly to be found in combination,” and they are
together “in a constant change.” The “heart (_Gemüth_), however,
has its source in the mind--in other words, feeling and desiring are
conditions, and for the most part changeable conditions of concepts”
(11: p. 26). The fundamental points in all this are that a soul is what
it itself builds up by experience, namely, by its relation to external
stimuli; that ideas constitute the primary and constant part of the
soul, while feeling and volition are only the outcome of the various
relations between these ideas.
Now the ultimate aim of education is the formation of character.
Character means the stability of will, or “the inner freedom” of will.
When will always chooses the good by its self-determination it is said
to have freedom. This means that each individual act of willing works
in harmony with the already existing system of wills; and in the full
attainment of this freedom or harmony lies the perfection of will or
character; morality means our striving toward this perfection. But,
according to Herbart, the source of will is the idea. “The circle
of thought contains the store of that which by degrees can mount
by the steps of interest to desire, and then by means of action to
volition.... The whole inner activity, indeed, has its abode in the
circle of thought. Here is found the initiative life, the primal
energy; ... Clearness, association, system, and method must rule here”
(9: p. 213) in order to secure a free, easy, energetic, and steady
activity of the will; and since meagerness of the store of ideas means
meagerness of interests, of motives, consequently, of the directions
of will activity, we must endeavor to enrich the circle of thought
as well as to make it clear and coherent. The help we extend to this
enrichment and systematization of ideas we call instruction. Our
ideas come from two main sources--experience of the objective world
and human intercourse. From the former develops the “empirical,”
the “speculative,” and the æsthetic interests; from the latter the
“sympathetic,” the social, and the religious interests. These are six
divisions of interest, according to Herbart. All of these interests
must be aroused and harmoniously developed in order that the child
may have a rich and coherent circle of thought. This is called, in
the Herbartian terminology, “many-sidedness of interest.” Many-sided
interest prevents one from falling into egoism; it provides the basis
for social bond and cooperation. By having a wide range of motives, and
consequently a balance of the will, one will find in it a “protection
in the future from the yoke of the desires and the passions. It will
arm him against fortune’s changes, and will make life worth living,
even when a cruel fate has robbed him of his dearest. It will guard him
from all errors which spring from idleness, and will provide him with a
new calling when the old has been closed to him. It will raise him to
the level from which earthly possessions and the successes of worldly
efforts seem but accidents which cannot touch the true self, for above
them stands the moral character, grand and free” (6: p. 96). Thus, as
the end of education is character, so the direct aim of instruction
is many-sided interest. Consequently, instruction should be, first of
all, manifold, and not one-sided. “Every avenue of approach should be
thrown open.” The apperceptive capacity of the child should be moved in
all directions. Of course we must accommodate the subject-matter to the
great variety of endowments the child presents. “Yet while instruction
must thus be differentiated, it should not be made so special as
to cultivate only the more prominent gifts; otherwise the pupil’s
less vigorous mental faculties would be wholly neglected and perhaps
suppressed” (8: p. 42).
Instruction should always follow the gradual progress of interest in
the pupil. A new apperception, a new interest is invariably to be
grafted upon the already existing ones. “When interest has not been
aroused, compulsory acquisition is not only worthless, leading as
it does to soulless, mechanical activity, but positively injurious,
because it vitiates the pupils’ mental aptitude and disposition” (8:
p. 290). Not mastery of a certain skill or thoroughness in any one
of the branches of knowledge, but fondness for these, accompanied
by the desire to further them, is the main thing, especially in
the early stages of instruction. “Interest means self-activity.
The demand for a many-sided interest is, therefore, a demand for a
many-sided self-activity” (8: p. 60). Herbart condemns the “_a
priori_ assumptions that certain subjects must be taught.” “The
intellectual self-activity of the pupil,” this is the end of “educative
instruction.” “This, and not mere knowledge, any more than utility,
determines the point of view with regard to the instruction material”
(8: p. 97).
Attention is another aspect of interest. It “may be broadly defined
as an attitude of mind in which there is readiness to form new ideas”
(8: p. 62). There are two kinds of attention--voluntary or forced,
and involuntary or spontaneous. The latter is “far more desirable and
fruitful,” for “forced attention does not suffice for instruction,
even though it may be had through disciplinary measures” (8: p. 135).
The involuntary attention is again divided into the primitive and the
apperceiving. “Primitive or original attention depends primarily upon
the strength of the sense impressions,” and the pleasure it affords (8:
p. 64). This signifies the same thing as momentary interest. We must
secure this in order to render instruction effective. “_Tediousness
is the greatest sin of instruction_” (5: p. 82). Apperceiving
attention feeds on the primitive attention; it is the outcome of
cultivated or permanent interest, and the expression of our whole
accumulated experience of the world and life.
The function of instruction is, we have been told, to systematize
the child’s thought as well as to enrich it. We are not only to pile
up the materials in his mind, but to construct them into a solid,
planful structure. Facts need a methodical treatment, Herbart claims,
in order that they may ever enlarge the scope of our mental activity.
This process of methodical treatment is called by the Herbartians “the
formal steps of instruction.” The perception or the idea of a thing
must be first made clear, then associated with the perception or the
idea of other things; thirdly, systematized with the whole previous
experience or stock of knowledge; and, lastly, made a living knowledge
by practical application.
In the process of instruction we may distinguish three modes or
phases--the purely presentative, the analytic, and the synthetic
instruction. The purely preservative or descriptive method aims to
produce results akin to an extension of the pupils’ range of actual
experience. Although it can only be applied to concrete matters, “skill
in this direction is the surest means of securing interest.” Free oral
presentation produces an effect that reading never does. To secure
success in this, “a cultivated style of speaking,” “adaptation of the
vocabulary employed, both to the subject-matter and to the intelligence
of the pupils, and adjustment of the phraseology to the pupils’ stage
of culture” and careful preparation are essential requisites. The aim
“should be to make the pupil realize events and objects as vividly as
if they were actually present to his eye and ear” (8: pp. 107-108).
But without previous experience, or at least a sufficient basis for
imaginative construction on the part of pupils, this would naturally
fail. Therefore we must endeavor to enlarge his apperceptive mass by
the aid of frequent excursions, by plentiful exhibitions of objects and
pictures, by giving the child a wide acquaintance with sense material.
Children in their natural experience or learning gather only a crude
mass of facts, resulting often in a chaotic apprehension. These facts,
therefore, must be worked over and rearranged in their minds in order
to become true knowledge. The instruction which aims at this is called
“Analytic” instruction. It is “awakening attention and reflection
through instruction, or exercise in thinking”; it is a sort of mental
cud of the whole stock of children’s direct and reproduced experience.
It consists in pointing out the main facts of a given whole, their
relations, the size, form, weight, number, attributes, uses of things,
in comparing, discriminating, generalizing, and classifying them; and
it may further involve the consideration of natural or artificial
origin and development of things.
“Analytic instruction” must depend on the materials already existing in
the pupil’s mind, and is thus limited by them. These are, of course,
insufficient for the rearing of his mental structure which may serve
his varied life-purposes. Something new and strange must be brought
in from outside his immediate environment. This is the function of
“synthetic instruction.” The quarry from which the materials come is
coextensive with the cultural history of the human race, including
the whole stock of literature and science. Synthetic instruction is
thus cultural instruction _per se_. It “builds with its own
stones,” the teacher himself determining directly the sequence and
grouping of parts of the lesson. Although interest partly depends on
the native capacity and inclination of the pupils, yet the choice of
the subject-matter and the manner of its presentation can to a large
extent determine it. “Synthetic instruction must offer subjects capable
of arousing lasting and spontaneously radiating interest.... The first
place belongs rather to those studies which appeal to the mind in a
variety of ways and are capable of stimulating each pupil according to
his individuality. For such subjects ample time must be allowed; they
must be made the object of prolonged diligent effort” (8: p. 127). For
the treatment of the subject the general order is, of course, “the easy
before the difficult, or, more specifically, that which prepares the
way, before that which cannot be firmly grasped without preliminary
knowledge”; things naturally must be brought down within the reach of
the pupils’ understanding, yet not made so easy as to exclude effort on
his part.
But Herbart shows his genuine pedagogic insight in warning against a
too strict adherence to logical sequence, or a too exacting insistence
upon perfect mastery in preliminary knowledge, as “equivalent to
scaring away interest.” He says:
“To make the road so level as to do away entirely with the necessity
for occasional leaps, means to provide for the convenience of the
teacher rather than for that of the pupils. The young love to climb
and jump; they do not take kindly to an absolutely level path” (8: p.
128).
Eager as he was in his advocacy of methodical instruction, yet he did
not overlook the greater importance of the pupil’s interest in the
content of subject-matter taught. After calling cursory reading the
worst method of beginning the study of languages, he adds:
“Even cursory reading, however, produces good results under one
condition, namely, the existence of a lively interest in the contents”
(8: p. 132).
As Herbart’s desire and attempt to bring about sequence and order in
instruction became schematized by some of his followers, the most
prominent of whom are Ziller and Rein, into “formal steps,” so his
endeavor to introduce unity and harmony into education was attenuated
by them into the doctrines of “culture stages” and “concentration
center.” The doctrine of “culture stages” is stated by Ziller as
follows:
“The mental development of the child corresponds, in general, to the
chief phases in the development of mankind. It therefore cannot be
better furthered than when he receives his mental nourishment from
the general development of culture as it is found in literature and
history. Every pupil should accordingly pass successively through
each of the chief epochs of the general mental development of mankind
suitable to his stage of development. The material of instruction,
therefore, should be drawn from the thought material of that stage of
historical development in culture which runs parallel with the present
mental state of the pupil” (6: p. 122).
In accordance with this theory, Ziller selected the following topics
which, he thought, would fit respectively the developmental stages
of children in the eight years of the school course: (1) Epic fairy
tales, (2) Robinson Crusoe, (3) History of the Patriarchs, (4) Judges
in Israel, (5) Kings in Israel, (6) Life of Christ, (7) History of
the Apostles, (8) History of the Reformation. And parallel to the
history of the Israelites, literature taken from German history was
to be taught. Not being satisfied with this artificial matching and
grading, Ziller wanted further to make the above-mentioned materials
the center of all instruction, connecting with them the teaching not
only of language, but of arithmetic, drawing, geography, and science.
With Professor Rein this idea was more reasonably modified. He also
uses these historical-humanistic studies as the “concentration-center,”
but other materials are only to be coördinated with them so far as
possible, not entirely absorbed into them.
Instruction, although it is the main part of education, must be
assisted by two other functions in order to be effective; namely,
government and discipline. The function of government is to keep
the pupils in order, in quiet, and in abeyance to the will of the
teacher. It is mere, though necessary, preparation for instruction and
discipline. It concerns itself only with the present of the pupil,
while instruction and discipline look to his future. Government
involves keeping children in constant occupation suitable to their
age and individuality, supervision, with numerous commands and
prohibitions, and certain rewards and punishments.
Instruction aims at the formation of character through the formation
of a system of sound judgments and clear insights, which motivate the
good will. It is discipline that completes the work of instruction by
the habituation of the will in the direction of virtue. Its task is
to harmonize and unify the manifold acts of will by subordinating
single momentary volitions to the moral ego which is gradually to
be formed in the mind of the child. As the object of instruction is
to give moral illumination to the will, so that of discipline is to
develop “moral strength of character.” Discipline is distinguished from
government by its being chiefly concerned with inner volition, while
the latter mainly deals with outward action. So it is not applied,
like government, by enforcement, but consists in reciprocal personal
reaction between the teacher and the pupil. Without the voluntary
reaction or willing coöperation on the part of the latter, discipline
is futile. Certain personal attitudes, sympathy and helpfulness on
the part of the teacher, confidence and dependence on the part of the
pupil, are the first requisites of training.
Thus we see that Herbart brought about, in his own way, a
reconciliation between the exclusive resort to formal discipline in
contempt of instruction, by means of which the source of rich and
refined motives is supplied, and the over-exaltation of impartment
of knowledge to the neglect of training, by which alone it becomes
power and life--giving also a due importance to the preliminary and
supporting function of supervision or government. In instruction
itself, also, the two opposite tendencies, the humanistic and the
empirical, find a higher unity. The humanistic school claimed the
knowledge stored in the history and literature of the race alone as
worth imparting, while the empirical asserted that the knowledge coming
from immediate personal experience alone deserves the name. Herbart
takes individual experience as the leading-string of instruction, and
unites with it the experience of the whole human race, incorporated in
culture and science.
In regard to the relation of the state and the home as educational
agencies, again, he gives a harmony to the one-sided views held by his
predecessors by making clear the particular positions occupied by both.
The state requires from its citizens their social and professional
efficiency. Hence it gives the best possible education to them to
produce this efficiency. Thus, the advancement of technical knowledge
and the multiplication of specialized scholarships are well secured
in the hand of the state. But it is not concerned so much with the
particular needs, nor the proportional development of the individual as
an individual, as with his serviceability to itself in his particular
line or sphere of work. “The state applies its test to what can be
tested, to the outward side of conduct and of knowledge. It does not
penetrate the inner life. Teachers in public schools cannot penetrate
much farther; they, too, are more concerned with the sum total of the
knowledge imparted by them, than with the individual and the way in
which he relates his knowledge to himself” (8: p. 318).
“The family, on the other hand, interested as it is in the individual,
must take the pedagogical point of view, according to which every human
being is to realize the best of which he is capable. It is essential
that families should grasp this distinction and accordingly, concern
themselves not with the greatness of particular achievements, but with
the totality of culture possible for the individual” (8: pp. 289-290).
As to moral discipline, the very nature of family organism requires
it to go deeper than the state does or ever can. “It is obvious,
therefore, that moral education will always remain essentially a home
task, and that the institutions of the state are to be resorted to
for educative purposes only with a view to supplementing the home.”
However, the family as it is has its drawbacks. Its life “is very
often too busy, too full of care, or too noisy for that rigor which is
undeniably required both for instruction and for morality. Luxury and
want alike harbor dangers for youth. Consequently families lean on the
state for support more than they ought” (8: p. 318).
So Herbart advocates that, “as much as possible, education must return
to the family,” provided “that sound pedagogical views have been
arrived at in the home and that the place is not occupied by absurd
whims or half knowledge” (8: pp. 319-320). For the present the work of
education should be carried on by the harmonious coöperation of the
state and the family, the school and the home. Private institutions
have their special place as the best experimental station for the art
of education, when provided with a picked set of pupils and teachers
and well-regulated environment.
“With the exception of Pestalozzi,” says Spielmann, “Herbart has
exercised the most important influence upon pedagogy.” Pestalozzi
gave the first impetus to “psychologizing” the process of education;
Herbart, continuing this movement, tried to make a science of it,
and became the father of the great school of pedagogy which bears
his name, and is represented by such renowned pedagogues as Mager,
Strümpell, Story, Waitz, von Sallwürk, Ziller, Vogt, Willmann, Rein,
Just, Dörffell, Frölich, Leutz, Frieck, and Helm. No academic pedagogy
probably has exerted such a wide and systematic influence upon the
field of education, especially of school instruction, as the Herbartian
school has. No such technicality and doctrination has, with the
probable exception of the Froebelian pedagogy among kindergartners,
ever so ruled the thought and practice of school teachers. Yet it has
received at the same time a strong and healthy opposition, chiefly
directed against its overdone methodization and schematization
carried on by his disciples rather than by Herbart himself. “Return
to Pestalozzi,” is the cry we have been hearing in some quarters from
German pedagogues. But though for the impartial learner no system of
pedagogy is absolutely binding authority, yet at the same time every
original thinker is to be our teacher, guide, and benefactor. When we
go back directly to him we find him speaking with the living power of
his personal experience and insight; it is the blind followers who kill
him by idolizing him.
Herbart indeed advocated making a scientific pedagogy the basis of
the practice of education. Yet he admits that “long will it be before
we have it, longer still before we can expect it from teachers.”
Moreover, even when this is reached, “it can never be a substitute for
observation of the pupil; the individual can only be discovered, not
deduced” (9: p. 83). As to his own system of pedagogy, it certainly
“affords an opportunity for estimating the breadth and the sphere of
education and the vastness of problems lying before it” (9: p. 77), and
also for seeing the exceeding complexity of every apparently simple
matter in it. He and his school unquestionably deserve an important
place in the history of pedagogy. But we must remember that psychology,
which is, according to him, the foundation of pedagogy, has made
progress by leaps and bounds since his day; that the social conditions
and needs also have seen a considerable change. Therefore, to those who
are disposed to linger at the starting-point of the great road opened
by him, instead of marching on along it with the same eagerness and
pioneering spirit which inspired Herbart himself, we offer the words
which he wrote to Herr von Steiger in reference to “the most abiding
of all the rules I send you”: “Remember, you must not be in the least
slavishly bound by them; I mean them rather as hints” (9: p. 8).
REFERENCES
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13. ---- Letters and Lectures on Education. Translated and edited by
H. M. and Mrs. E. Felkin. Sonnenschein, London, 1901. 295 pages.
14. +Lang, Ossian, H.+ Outlines of Herbart’s Pedagogics; with
Biographical Introduction. Kellogg, New York, 1894. 72 pages.
15. +Rein, Georg Wilhelm.+ Outlines of Pedagogics. Translated
by C. C. and J. J. Van Liew. Sonnenschein, London, 1893. 199 pages.
16. ---- Encyklopädisches Handbuch der Pädagogik. 8 vols. Beyer,
Langensalza, 1895-1906. Vol. III.
17. +Sallwürk, Ernst von.+ Gesinnungsunterricht und
Kulturgeschichte; zu pädagogischen Kritik. Beyer, Langensalza, 1887.
103 pages.
18. +Scherer, Heinrich.+ Die Pädagogik in ihrer Entwicklung
im Zusammenhange mit dem Kultur- und Geistesleben und ihrem Einfluss
auf die Gestaltung des Erziehungs- und Bildungswesens. Vol. II. Die
Pädagogik als Wissenschaft von Pestalozzi bis zur Gegenwart. 3 parts.
Brandstetter, Leipzig, 1897-1908.
19. +Schmid, Karl Adolf.+ Geschichte der Erziehung vom Anfang
an bis auf unsere Zeit. 5 vols. Cotta, Stuttgart, 1884-1902. Vol. IV.
Part II.
20. +Spielmann, C. Christian.+ Die Meister der Pädagogik nach
ihren Leben, ihren Werken und ihrer Bedeutung. Heufer, Neuwied,
1904-1905. 365 pages. Part VI.
21. +Strümpell, Ludwig H.+ Das System der Pädagogik Herbart’s.
Part III. Pädagogische Abhandlungen. Dichert, Leipzig, 1894.
22. +Wiget, Theodor.+ Die formalen Stufen des Unterrichts; eine
Einführung in die Schriften Zillers. Seventh edition. Rich, Chur.,
1901. 117 pages.
23. +Ziegler, Theobald.+ Geschichte der Pädagogik mit
besonderer Rücksicht auf das höhere Unterrichtswesen. Beck, München,
1895. 361 pages.
CHAPTER X.
HERBERT SPENCER
(1820-1903)
Spencer introduces no new ideas into the history of pedagogy. His
treatise is little more than a new version of the Rousseauean and
Pestalozzian ideas. But foreign ideas, as such, seldom penetrate the
English soil, and the Anglo-Saxon mind naturally rebels against a
man of Rousseau’s type. Thus the realistic, psychological tendencies
in education which had been conquering the Continent needed their
English translator. He was found in the person of the greatest English
philosopher of the nineteenth century. What Rousseau grasped by the
bold flight of his poetic genius, Spencer brought down to the earthly
level by scientific evidence and arguments; what Pestalozzi uttered
in the inspiration of his prophetic vision, Spencer reiterated in the
words of common sense. Thus the Anglo-Saxon world listened to the
messages of the two great continental prophets through the voice of the
apostle of her own production. So it came about that the pedagogical
stream which had taken its rise in the island empire through Bacon and
Locke, and flowed out into the Continent, becoming ever deeper and
deeper, now streamed back to its original source.
Nevertheless, Spencer was by no means an expounder of foreign thoughts
in the ordinary sense of the term; he was the last man for that. “He
was at no time a great reader. The influence of other thinkers did
not come to him through books, but their ideas were picked up by the
wayside, so to speak, or rather imbibed from the air in which they
floated, without his being aware of it” (5: p. 210). He was one of the
most independent and original thinkers; he was so aloof and isolated
from the preceding and current history of thought that his critics
account this the weakness of his philosophy in general. Yet if he was
independent of the history of thought embodied in books, he was not
and could not be so of its living current. We see a new widening of
scientific outlook and a great upheaval of the realistic spirit in
the first half of the nineteenth century, of which England was again,
as three centuries before, the harbinger. This new _Zeitgeist_
of the nineteenth century England was provided with a mouthpiece in
this independent, “fully self-governed and habitually self-sufficing,”
self-educated philosopher. He it was that in the nineteenth century
England wielded the first axe to break down her most obstinate
conservatism in the field of education. True, he was not the only one
to be called for this work, but his blows were the boldest and the most
systematic.
Spencer’s first attack was directed against the fortress of the
exalted “classics” or “cultural studies.” The positive aspect of
this was the claim for a higher, nay, the highest place for science
in the school curriculum. This battle had, indeed, been waged since
the time of Bacon, but the development of the new sciences had only
made the English schools close their gates tighter. “Science was
tabooed in most schools and frowned upon in innumerable pulpits.” “The
attitude of the universities toward natural science has been that of
contemptuous nonrecognition. College authorities have long resisted,
either actively or passively, the making of physiology, chemistry,
geology, etc., subjects of examination” (9: p. 375). Here came Spencer,
the nonconformist of nonconformists, and poured cold water over the
long-established dignity of “the education of the gentleman,” saying:
“Men dress their children’s minds as they do their bodies, in the
prevailing fashion. As the Orinoco Indian puts on his paint before
leaving his hut, not with a view to any direct benefit, but because
he would be ashamed to be seen without; so a boy’s drilling in Latin
and Greek is insisted upon, not because of their intrinsic value, but
that he may not be disgraced by being found ignorant of them--that he
may have ‘the education of a gentleman’--the badge marking a certain
social position, and bringing a consequent respect.... Not what
knowledge is of most real worth, is the consideration; but what will
bring most applause, honor, respect--what will most conduce to social
position and influence--what will be most imposing. As, through life,
not what we are, but what we shall be thought, is the question, so in
education the question is not the intrinsic value of knowledge so much
as its extrinsic effects on others” (7: pp. 23-26).
Thus Spencer proposes the determination of the comparative, intrinsic
value of different kinds of studies as the matter of first importance
in putting education on a surer foundation. “This is,” he says, “the
question of questions, which it is high time we discussed in some
methodical way.” “What is the use of it?” was the question repeatedly
raised by every educational reformer from Bacon down. But Spencer would
settle the question once for all in the light of a standard which
should be rationally established as universal and necessary. What,
then, is this standard?
Any value of an object which is intrinsic is determined by its bearing
upon our life. Life--this is the ultimate test to which all must appeal
either directly or indirectly. Anything which does not serve our
individual and social life has no value whatever. “How to live” is the
fundamental problem for us all. Every special problem of mankind is
comprised in this one problem.
“In what way to treat the body; in what way to treat the mind; in
what way to manage our affairs; in what way to bring up a family;
in what way to behave as a citizen; in what way to utilize all the
sources of happiness which Nature supplies--how to use all our
faculties to the greatest advantage of ourselves and others--how to
live completely? And this being the greatest thing needful for us to
learn, is by consequence the great thing which education has to teach.
To prepare us for complete living is the function which education has
to discharge; and the only rational mode of judging of any educational
course is to judge in what degree it discharges such function” (7: pp.
30-31).
Human life is constituted of various activities which can be classified
into:
“1. Those activities which directly minister to self-preservation;
2. Those which by securing necessaries of life indirectly minister
to self-preservation; 3. Those which have for their end the rearing
and discipline of offspring; 4. Those which are involved in the
maintenance of proper social and political relations; 5. Those
miscellaneous activities which make-up the leisure part of life,
devoted to the gratification of the tastes and feelings” (7: p. 32).
The above stand, considered from the biological and anthropological
point of view, “in something like their true order of subordination.”
Spencer takes each of these departments of human activities one by one
and tries to convince us of how necessary is the knowledge of hygiene
and physiology for our self-preservation; nothing less than that of
mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and social sciences for
our economic activities; that of physiology, hygiene, psychology,
anthropology, and pedagogy for the performance of the parental
function; that of sociology, which, according to him, must comprise a
study of the laws of social organism, as well as its description in
its political, economical, religious, social, and cultural growth, for
the fulfilment of the duties of citizenship. Even in the domain of our
æsthetic life, he thinks, a systematized knowledge of facts and laws
concerning natural and psychic worlds will increase the power of both
æsthetic production and enjoyment.
Then Spencer turns to the value of the sciences for the training of
the mental powers. First of all he refers us to “the beautiful economy
of Nature,” according to which “everywhere throughout creation we find
faculties developed through the performance of those functions which it
is their office to perform; not through the performance of artificial
exercises devised to fit them for these functions” (7: pp. 84-85). So
we may be certain _a priori_, he thinks, that also in education
the acquirement of the valuable facts must involve the best mental
exercise. Then he shows us, taking up different sciences one by one,
how, through the systematic pursuance of the facts and laws of Nature
and life which they present, we are better trained in our power of
memory, of judgment, of reasoning, in our moral character, and even
in our religious sentiments, than through linguistic studies, which
largely consist, in fact, of “lexicons and grammars.”
Spencer’s next plea is for a freer education, as opposed to the
prevailing one of coercion. The nineteenth century was the age for
the triumph of individual freedom. The infallible authority of the
Church, of monarchs, of the head of the family, were thrown down, one
after another, through revolution and through development. Society
became free and democratic in its every phase and department. Thus
it was quite natural that the systematic revaluation of educational
spirit and method, on the basis of changed conditions of society,
should be reiterated by him in whom the individualism of the
nineteenth-century culminates in respect to personality as well as
philosophy. Liberty for the nature of the educated, for his spontaneous
activities and enjoyments, encouragement of his self-instruction and
independent thinking; none of the unnecessary and harmful restraints,
authoritative commands and rote learning--this must be the principle
of reform toward “modern modes of culture corresponding to our more
liberal religious and political institutions.” Indeed, the above
is nothing but the principle advocated so forcibly by Rousseau and
Pestalozzi. The ice was already broken by them, and on the Continent,
especially in Germany, their followers marched on far along the
opened course. But England needed an apostle of her own before she
would accept this gospel of psychological naturalism. And what had
appeared in Rousseau as educational Romanticism, and in Pestalozzi
as educational Humanitarianism, took in Spencer the form of what we
might call educational Liberalism and Evolutionism. In his emotional
motive, Spencer’s theory is based on his political Liberalism; in his
intellectual ground, on his conception of psychic and social evolution.
He writes:
“Thus, then, we are on the highway toward the doctrine, long ago
enunciated by Pestalozzi, that alike in its order and in its
methods, education must conform to the natural process of mental
evolution--that there is a certain sequence in which the faculties
spontaneously develop, and a certain kind of knowledge which each
requires during its development; and that it is for us to ascertain
this sequence and supply this knowledge” (7: p. 110).
Success in every educational effort depends upon “rendering our
measures subservient to that spontaneous unfolding which all minds
go through in their progress to maturity” (7: p. 111). This natural
sequence in the spontaneous unfolding of faculties Pestalozzi
endeavored to find empirically in observing the individual minds of
children. Spencer, on the contrary, would search for it in the course
of the race development. This idea of general parallelism between
the development of the individual and the race had already been held
by Rousseau and the Herbartians. But Spencer seems to be ignorant
of this: he only cites Comte as having reached the same view, in
believing “that, rightly conducted, the education of the individual
must have a certain correspondence with the evolution of the race.”
The fundamental principle of Spencerian education is to “carry each
child’s mind through a process like that which the mind of humanity
at large has gone through.” The principle rests on two grounds: one
is the law of hereditary transmission of acquired tendencies or
qualities, and the other the necessary relationships, common to all
ages, between the mind and its objects. From the former “it follows
that if there be an order in which the human race has mastered its
various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude
to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order. So that, even
if the order were intrinsically indifferent, it would facilitate
education to lead the individual mind through the steps traversed by
the general mind.” The latter teaches us that the order of racial
development has not been intrinsically indifferent, but “was in its
main outlines a necessary one”; that “as the mind of humanity, placed
in the midst of the phenomena and striving to comprehend them, has,
after endless comparisons, speculations, experiments, and theories,
reached its present knowledge of each subject by a specific route, it
may rationally be inferred that the relationship between the mind and
phenomena is such as to prevent this knowledge from being reached in
any other route; and that, as each child’s mind stands in the same
relationship to phenomena, they can be accessible to it only through
the same route” (7: p. 123). Thus, according to Spencer, anthropology
or developmental sociology as well as psychology are necessary bases
for education, for lack of which our school curricula are burdened with
useless learning.
“Humanity has progressed solely by self-instruction,” so we must
develop ourselves also by self-education. This is the central plea of
our self-made philosopher. He writes:
“Those who have been brought up under the ordinary school drill, and
have carried away with them the idea that education is practicable
only in that style, will think it hopeless to make children their own
teachers. If, however, they will call to mind that the all-important
knowledge of surrounding objects which a child gets in its early
years is got without help--if they will remember that the child is
self-taught in the use of its mother tongue; if they will estimate
the amount of that experience of life, that out-of-school wisdom,
which every boy gathers for himself; if they will mark the unusual
intelligence of the uncared-for London gamin, as shown in all the
directions in which his faculties have been tasked; if further, they
will think how many minds have struggled up unaided not only through
the mysteries of our irrationally planned curriculum, but through
hosts of other obstacles besides--they will find it a not unreasonable
conclusion, that if the subject be put before him in right order
and right form, any pupil of ordinary capacity will surmount his
successive difficulties with but little assistance” (7: p. 125).
Thus, his much-quoted phrase:
“Children should be led to make their own investigations and to
draw their own inferences. They should be _told_ as little as
possible, and induced to _discover_ as much as possible” (7: p.
124).
From this point of view the rejection of hasty and indiscriminate book
instruction is simply a necessary consequence.
Interest is to be the guide and criterion of all instruction or culture.
“A child’s intellectual instincts are more trustworthy than our
reasonings. In respect to the knowing faculties, we may confidentially
trust in the general law, that under normal conditions, healthful
action is pleasurable, while action that gives pain is not healthful”
(7: p. 127).
The result of thus making education a process of self-instruction will,
moreover, be to form a never-dying habit of progressive self-culture,
to cultivate courage in attacking difficulties, patient concentration
of attention, perseverance through failure, to give a good temper,
cheerfulness, and confidence, instead of a permanent moroseness,
timidity, and even depression; to establish a friendly, trustful, and
consequently influential relationship between the teacher and the pupil.
Here we need not stop to point out how thoroughgoing a Rousseauean
is Spencer in his view of intellectual training. He is equally, if
not more so, in his conception of the fundamental principles of moral
culture. Only the English Empiricist does not agree with the French
Romanticist in believing in the original goodness or innocence of the
child; nor can he idealize, with the Swiss enthusiast, the educational
capability of parental love; nor does he expect, with the German
idealist-patriot, to be able to produce a new species of humanity out
of the present imperfect society by the single instrument of a perfect
system of education. According to him, “no system of moral culture
can forthwith make children altogether what they should be; ... even
were there a system that would do this, existing parents are too
imperfect to carry it out; and even could such a system be successfully
carried out, its results would be disastrously incongruous with the
present state of society” (7: p. 171). Progress of the social organism
necessarily must be organic and evolutionary; the improvement of family
discipline must go together with that of every other institution
of society. Yet this does not prevent us from “elaborating and
recommending methods that are in advance of time.”
The human race has learned rightness or wrongness of conduct by its
total consequences, immediate and remote. “The happiness or misery
caused by it are the ultimate standards by which all men judge of
behavior” (7: p. 174). So in the case of individuals, their moral
insight can only be truly developed by their experiencing the full
bearing of each particular line of conduct. “Proper conduct in life
is much better guaranteed when the good and evil consequences of
actions are rationally understood, than when they are merely believed
on authority” (7: p. 185). The function of parents as “ministers and
interpreters of Nature” is to see that nothing more nor less than the
full weight of the true, natural consequences of their children’s
conduct should be always experienced by them.
“It is a vice of the common system of artificial rewards and
punishments, long since noticed by the clear-sighted, that by
substituting for the natural results of misbehavior certain threatened
tasks or castigations it produced a radically wrong standard of moral
guidance. Having throughout infancy and boyhood always regarded
parental or tutorial displeasure as the result of a forbidden action,
the youth has gained an established association of ideas between such
action and such displeasure, as cause and effect; and consequently,
when parents and tutors have abdicated, and their displeasure is not
to be feared, the restraint on a forbidden action is in great measure
removed; the true restraints, the natural reactions, having yet to be
learned by sad experience” (7: pp. 185-186).
In minor rules of moral training, too, Spencer follows Rousseau. In
his warning against the unwisdom of setting up a high standard for
children, which invites the detrimental results of moral precosity;
against the overregulation and constant admonition, which produces
nothing but “hothouse virtue” and “a chronic domestic irritation”; in
his advocacy of a due authority maintained with decision of character
and consistency of judgment, and the like, we have the reverberation
from “Émile.”
The aim of moral discipline, according to Spencer, is not so much
to turn out an obedient, well-behaved individual, as to produce “a
self-governing being,” which democratic society most needs. As to its
agent, he, without raising a question, intrusts the task solely to the
parents. At the same time, however, he wants to impress upon them the
extreme complexity and difficulty of the task, and the consequent need
of knowledge and self-culture, as well as vigilance, patience, and
ingenuity.
Spencer was one among the prophets who proclaimed the morality of
hygiene, which now has become a commonplace matter. He writes:
“Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as a physical
morality.... Disorders entailed by disobedience to Nature’s dictates
they regard simply as grievances, not as the effects of a conduct
more or less flagitious. Though the evil consequences inflicted on
their dependents and on future generations are often as great as
those caused by crime; yet they do not think themselves in any degree
criminal.... The fact is that all breaches of the laws of health are
physical sins. When this is generally seen, then, and perhaps not
till then, will the physical training of the young receive all the
attention it deserves” (7: pp. 282-283).
We should never forget that man is an animal. “The first requisite to
success in life is to be a good animal, and to be a nation of good
animals is the first condition to national prosperity” (7: p. 222).
In regard to the physical care of the child, Spencer is, unlike his
older compatriot Locke, an Epicurean, the scientific Epicurean, if you
please. He preaches the gospel of high feeding, of ample clothing,
and opposes strongly overeducation. The fundamental principle is that
“in proportion as growth and organization are incomplete, much must
be given and little required.” Spencer calls our present system of
overeducation vicious--“vicious, as giving knowledge that will soon
be forgotten; vicious, as producing a disgust for knowledge; vicious,
as neglecting that organization of knowledge which is more important
than its acquisition; vicious, as weakening or destroying that energy
without which a trained intellect is useless; vicious, as entailing
that ill-health for which even success would not compensate, and which
makes failure doubly bitter” (7: p. 278).
As to physical exercises, Spencer hated gymnastics. It is merely
“better than nothing”; it is the practice originated by warfare, which
has “remained congruous only with the militant type of society”; it
is simply the introduction of one artificiality to remedy the evils
of another; namely, the suppression of free, spontaneous play. It
being formal, and necessarily much less varied than plays and sports,
taxes heavily special parts of the body, and thus causes a quicker
fatigue and disproportionate development; being forced, it lacks the
spontaneous interest and accompanying pleasures, which serve as the
most healthful tonic for recreation and invigoration of our physical
organism; and when carried to excess it may develop an abnormal power
of muscles only at the cost of constitutional deterioration.
Spencer was probably among the first who advocated the essential
need of free outdoor games for girls as much as for boys, saying:
“Whoever forbids them forbids the divinely appointed means of physical
development” (7: p. 258). He asks:
“Why this astonishing difference? Is it that the constitution of a
girl differs so entirely from that of a boy as not to need these
active exercises? Is it that a girl has none of the promptings to
vociferous play by which boys are impelled? Or is it that, while in
boys these promptings are to be regarded as securing that bodily
activity without which there cannot be adequate development, their
sisters’ nature has been given to them for no purpose whatever--unless
it be for the vexations of schoolmistresses” (7: p. 254).
He thinks that the fear that unrestrained plays form unladylike habits
and manners is groundless.
“For if the sportive activity allowed to boys does not prevent them
from growing up into gentlemen, why should a like sportive activity
allowed to girls prevent them from growing up into ladies?... How
absurd is the supposition that the womanly instincts would not assert
themselves but for the rigorous discipline of schoolmistresses!” (7:
pp. 255-256).
Spencer, with his “constitutional disregard of authority,” and with his
personal experience of self-culture, is systematically opposed to the
policy of state education. In his mind, systematic school education
was synonymous with artificial culture and coercive discipline. The
most serious defect of it, however, is its necessary tendency toward
overintellectualization. And the current, undue exaltation of academic
training is based on the overestimation of the rôle of intellect at the
cost of our emotional nature.
“Sensations and emotions are parts of consciousness, and so far from
being its minor components, they are its major components.... Like
respirations and winkings of the eyes, their unceasingness makes us
oblivious of them. Yet every instant emotions are present. No movement
is made but what is preceded by a prompting feeling as well as a
prompting thought.... The emotions are master, the intellect is the
servant. The guidance of our acts through perception and reason has
for its end the satisfaction of feelings, which at once prompt the
acts and yield the energy for performance of the acts” (10: pp. 36-38).
But overemphasis on academic training, which is necessarily artificial
and intellectual, also tends to the neglect of emotional elements even
in art, whose proper domain is emotion. “Not the arousing of certain
sentiments, but the communication of certain ideas is thus represented
as the poet’s office.” “It is not enough for a picture to gratify the
æsthetic perceptions or raise pleasurable emotions” (10: pp. 44-45).
The drama or music is valued on the basis of its serviceability to
moral instruction or intellectual enlightenment, while the primary and
all-sufficient purpose of art is pleasure.
From this dislike of academic education, his opposition to compulsory
universalizing of this form of training by the power of authority
is only natural. His plea is for an educational individualism, that
each member of society should be “left to do his best for himself and
children.” It rests upon his two fundamental conceptions in regard
to the social organism. First, that the “social organism grows”; it
is not artificially formed. Secondly, that the law of its growth is
a progressive individualization. If his argument is now behind the
times, it is not without much historical interest for us. For he is
the best representative of that educational conservatism which has
long withstood, in Great Britain and America, the modern tide of
state education which started from Germany. Moreover, it is still a
strong voice deserving attention as a warning against the dangers and
defects of state education. The contention of the state educationists,
as Spencer understands, is that parents, and especially those whose
children most need instructing, lack knowledge and judgment in the
matter of education. But Spencer thinks that the implication that “the
interest and judgment of a government are insufficient security” is “a
very questionable assumption.” The government’s interest, according
to him, would necessarily tend to conservatism, and likewise the
school-teacher’s interest, while a true education must always be a
revolutionary force of society--“always fitting men for higher things,
and _un_fitting them for things as they are” (9: p. 373).
The state educationists ignore the educational significance of the
natural relationships between parent and children. “In these strong
affections and mutual dependencies observers believed they saw an
admirably arranged chain of influences, calculated to secure the
mental and physical development of successive generations; and in the
simplicity of their faith had concluded that these divinely appointed
means were fully sufficient for this purpose.” But, according to them,
“this combination of affections and interests was not provided for such
a purpose, or what is the same thing, that it has no purpose at all.
And so, in default of any natural provision for supplying the exigency,
legislators exhibit to us the design and specification for a state
machine, made up of masters, ushers, inspectors, and councils, to be
worked by a due proportion of taxes, and to be plentifully supplied
with raw material, in the shape of little boys and girls, out of which
it is to grind a population of well-trained men and women, who shall
be ‘useful members of the community’” (9: pp. 366-367). They forget
that “educational systems, like political and other institutions, are
generally as good as the state of human nature permits,” and that no
hasty reform in education, which is not coördinated with that of other
departments of life and the general elevation of the whole social
organism, can succeed. Any attempt at uniformatization, at the present
stage of progress, of educational system by an authoritative hand would
bring more harm than benefit. For “were we in possession of the true
method, divergence from it would, of course, be prejudicial; but the
true method having to be found, the efforts of numerous independent
seekers carrying out their researches in different directions
constitute a better agency for finding it than any that could be
devised” (7: p. 101).
Moreover, the use and function of government is, according to Spencer,
only negative. “To the bad, it is essential; to the good, not. It
is the check which national wickedness makes to itself, and exists
only to the same degree.” So the extension of government authority or
interference is rather a retrogression of society. “As civilization
advances does the government decay,” and ought to decay (9: p. 25).
Therefore, he concludes, let the spread of enlightenment be free
and spontaneous. “If supply and demand are allowed free play in the
intellectual sphere as in the economic sphere, ... education must
conduce to social stability as well as to the other benefits. For if
those of the lower ranks are left to get culture for their children
as best they may, just as they are left to get food and clothing
for them, it must follow that the children of the superior will be
advantaged: the thrifty parents, the energetic, and those with a high
sense of responsibility will buy education for their children to a
greater extent than will the improvident and the idle. And if character
is inherited, then the average result must be that the children of
the superior will prosper and increase more than the children of the
inferior. There will be a multiplication of the fittest instead of a
multiplication of the unfittest” (10: pp. 92-93).
Spencer’s treatise on “Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical,”
in which most of his pedagogical views are given, though a mere
collection of occasional magazine articles, is nevertheless a work into
which he put his heart and soul. When it appeared in 1860, in book
form, it carried his fame for the first time into the wide region of
the world; it has been translated into thirteen languages; in England
and America it has been used as a text-book, forming until recently an
important basis of popular pedagogic ideas. Probably no educational
treatise written in English has exerted a wider influence than
Spencer’s, and in spite of its obvious one-sidedness, it is certainly
one of the greatest works which has appeared in the pedagogic world on
Anglo-Saxon soil.
REFERENCES
1. +Compayré, Jules Gabriel.+ History of Pedagogy. Translated,
with an introduction, notes, and an index, by W. H. Payne. Heath &
Co., Boston, 1903. 598 pages.
2. ---- Herbert Spencer et l’Education Scientifique. Delaplane, Paris,
1901. 116 pages.
3. +Duncan, David.+ Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer.
Appleton, New York, 1908. 2 vols.
4. +Gaupp, Otto.+ Herbert Spencer. Frommann, Stuttgart, 1897.
160 pages. (Frommann’s Klassiker der Philosophie.)
5. +Royce, Josiah.+ Herbert Spencer, an Estimate and a Review
by Josiah Royce; together with a chapter of personal reminiscences by
James Collier. Fox, Duffield & Co., New York, 1904. 234 pages.
6. +Quick, Robert Hebert.+ Essays on Educational Reformers.
Appleton, New York, 1890. 560 pages. The same (International Education
Series), 1903. 568 pages.
7. +Spencer, Herbert.+ Education: Intellectual, Moral, and
Physical. Appleton, New York, 1900. 301 pages.
8. ---- Philosophy of Style. Appleton, New York, 1901. 55 pages.
9. ---- Social Statistics. Appleton, New York, 1882. 523 pages.
10. ---- Facts and Comments. Appleton, New York, 1902. 292 pages.
11. ---- An Autobiography. Appleton, New York, 1904. 2 vols.
12. Herbert Spencer. A Symposium by Harris, Cook, Sutton, Winship,
Rose. Proceedings of National Education Association, 1904. pp. 214-231.
CHAPTER XI.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
(1770-1831)
Hegel never actually wrote or lectured on education as such, although,
according to Rosenkranz, he intended to write what he significantly
called “_Staatspädagogik_.” This slowly matured genius, whose
interest was speculative more than practical, died too young to fulfill
this design. He had no pedagogic impulse such as is seen in Fichte or
Herbart. He was to the end essentially a learner rather than a teacher,
notwithstanding the fact that his whole life was spent in educational
work of various kinds. Nevertheless, he could not help but be touched
by the intense pedagogical spirit of his age. The collection of his
ideas on the problem of education, drawn from scattered sources,
was published in 1853 by one of his disciples, G. Thaulow. The
collaboration of them into a system on the basis of his philosophy
was made by his most faithful follower, K. Rosenkranz, whose work,
“Pedagogy as a System,” has had until recently a considerable influence
in the educational world.
Hegel was born the son of a government official and brought up in a
home which was in “direct and varied relation with many persons of
high official rank.” He did not, like Pestalozzi, share the lot of the
common herd. Nor did he taste such hardships of fate as did Fichte. He
lived, as a child, as a university student, as a family tutor, as a
school man, as a university professor, ever in the air of officialdom
and aristocracy.
Moreover, we are told that youth had but a short duration for him.
In his student days at Tübingen he gained the nickname of “the old
man.” Rousseau had once charmed the young Hegel, as he did every youth
of his time; Schelling had fascinated him; Fichte had inspired him
with enthusiasm; but Hegel outgrew quickly and abandoned all these
romantic tendencies. Heinrich Hotho, one of his pupils, writes in his
recollections:
“He was bitter against the demagogues who were ever seeking ‘new
things’ in statecraft. Against the caprice of personal opinion,
subjective fancy, arbitrary passion, he set himself, seeking to do
away with these from youth up, and to put in their place--to do away
by putting in their place--a just appreciation of the real, the
lawful, the substantial. The senses, sentiments, impulses, wishes,
and will were to be brought into free harmony with the necessary and
rational, and their accord made habitual” (3: p. 98).
Most geniuses are “youth, intensified, and prolonged,” but Hegel
shows his genius in maturity of insight and judgment. Not the fire
of prophetic spirit, not the flashes of poetic intuitions, but a
proportioned completeness of catholicism and classicism constituted the
type of his mental greatness.
Solger, visiting Hegel at the beginning of his Berlin career, writes
to Tieck: “I was curious to see what impression the good Hegel would
make here. No one talks of him, for he is quiet and busy” (3: p. 78).
Yes, “quiet and busy”--this characterizes his mental as well as public
life. Nothing like revelation, inspiration, sudden intuition, but only
a long, painstaking, methodical reasoning brought him truths. Not
only each of his thoughts, but also each of his phrases and words he
determined by laborious weighing and balancing. He despised the mere
expression of immediate feelings as a pseudo-philosophy, smacking
of the Romantic school. For him, “philosophy was to express ‘with
colorless words’ (_mit dürren Worten_) the clear, crystalline
outlines of thought--the cool judgment of the spirit” (3: p. 39).
Thus, according to his own characterization of the four traditional
classifications of temperament, he belongs preëminently to the
phlegmatic. His mind is objective, with little subjectivity; more
historical than prophetic, more discursive than intuitive, more
inclined to systematization than reformation, more conservative than
destructive.
This is Hegel. And in him Germany found a great counteracting agency
against the sweeping movement of educational reform, engendered by
the romantic and revolutionary spirit of the age. In this regard
Hegel reminds us of Herbart. The dawn of the new Germany needed such
prophetic men as Pestalozzi and Fichte, but her pacification and
solidarity required a more constructive genius. Pestalozzi and Fichte
stood as the champions of National Education. Hegel, “the official
philosopher,” as he is often called, would become the advocate of
“State Pedagogy.”
Hegel’s philosophy has been called the Objective Absolute Idealism as
opposed to the Subjective Absolute Idealism of Fichte, and the Logical
Pantheism as opposed to the Alogical Pantheism of Schopenhauer. The
logically minded Hegel saw methodical progressions of thought going on
everywhere in the life of nature and humanity. The universal Essence or
the Absolute was to him the mind, the intellect, or the reason. Every
existence or phenomenon is the manifestation of the eternal unfolding
of the Divine Reason. Everything in the world is “becoming,” is in the
process of evolution; this “becoming” is the only actuality and life.
This eternally progressive world-process is the education of universal
beings by and through the _Logos_ or the self-education of God.
Man takes part in the world-process of education, and realizes in
himself the end of this evolution by becoming a free, self-conscious
spirit--God attaining in him the consciousness of Himself.
The human share and endeavor in the universal “becoming,” or the
evolution of the _Logos_ in mankind, constitutes the history of
the race. Human history is, in general, the process of the liberation
of spirit or reason from its bondage--from all external and debasing
powers. By these not only political, social, and family despotism are
meant, but also one’s own passions, natural desires, inclinations,
willfulness, arbitrariness, etc. For freedom does not consist in
licentiousness; it is the unbounded self-activity of the Spirit
according to its own law. This law is given by reason. Thus freedom can
be regarded as lawful action according to rational insight. Therefore
the universal realization of self-conscious reason and freedom of the
spiritual nature is the teleology of human history. Education from this
standpoint means the progressive perfection of humanity from a naïve,
unconscious, primitive state of spirit or reason through the hard
discipline of slavery and bondage to the consciousness and exercise of
its freedom.
To share in this progressive perfection of the race and contribute to
its promotion is the destiny of individuals. The connection between
the culture of the race and the development of the individual is very
close. The latter can only grow in the breast of the former. And the
culmination of this close relationship between the whole and its
part is the state. It is the most highly developed and compact form
of society. History is the objectified, realized humanity, and its
attainments are embodied in the institutional life of the state. The
individual must take part in this life of the state and “live in the
spirit of the nation.” This is the free relation of give and take. But
the child cannot by himself enter into the free mutual relation of give
and take with society. He is not only incapable of giving his part to
society, but also of taking his share from it. Some one else must do
this for him. To do this is the duty of parents and teachers, and the
art of fulfilling this duty is education in its narrow sense.
For Hegel the child is no angelic being. Innocence as such has no
moral value, so far as it is ignorance of the bad and rests on the
lack of desire by which the bad can take place. Nor does he recognize
the morality of instincts and impulses. Moral freedom is won “through
the stern strife against the naïve subjectivity of life, against the
immediateness of arbitrary desire and passion” (3: p. 109). Childhood
in itself has no value for Hegel. It is not as it was for Rousseau and
Froebel, a state to be lived out, but a state to be outgrown. “The
child has a right to be educated,” only because it has the destiny to
become a man, and yet it is not and does not become so by mere natural
development.
“Education is the art of making men moral. It regards man as natural,
and points out how he may be born anew--how his first nature may be
changed to a second spiritual nature” (3: p. 107). Morality means the
mastery of reason over natural desires and inclinations. The child’s
undeveloped reason must be, at first, subjected to the developed
reason, which is “manifested in the will of his parents, in the
knowledge of his teachers, and in the surrounding world.” His growing
self must be set in the larger life of the whole, in which mature
reason, mature will, mature morality are realized.
“Education may be defined as the visible, progressive transcending
of the negative or subjective. For the child, as the form of the
potentiality of a moral individual, is a subjective and negative
being. His becoming a man is the outgrowing this form; and his
education is the discipline or process by which this is done. To gain
this positive and essential character he first must be nourished at
the breast of the universally moral; he must live as a stranger in
the absolute institution of that morality; he must make more and
more of it his own, and finally pass over into the universal spirit.
It is evident from this that the effort to be virtuous, to obtain
absolute morality through education, is not at all a striving after
an individual and separate morality. Indeed, such an effort after a
positive morality peculiarly one’s own, would be vain and in itself
impossible” (3: p. 107).
The educator, then, is no longer to be a mere jealous guardian of
Nature’s own developing and educating process, but he is the conscious
delegate of the mature generation or the state, whose office is to
unite and subordinate the child to the general culture already acquired
by them in the course of evolution.
Hegel’s pedagogical ideas are best seen in his delineation of the “ages
of man,” which Thaulow calls “an epitome of all pedagogy.”
“The development of the normal human being is made up of a series of
processes. These change in accordance with the changing relation of
the individual to the race and to the external world” (3: p. 118).
He divides childhood into three--including the fetus, four--stages.
But, since the “child before birth has no peculiar individuality,
none related in a particular way to particular objects,” there is no
education proper here. “At birth it passes from vegetative to animal
existence.” He has the most finely organized, infinitely adaptable body
of all animals. The growth is not only quantitative, but qualitative.
And together with its physical growth goes the mental development, this
first stage of infant life being “the time in which the human being
learns most. Now the child is made a confidant of all the senses. The
outer world becomes a reality to him. He advances from sensation to
perception.... He projects his world about himself” (3: pp. 119-120).
“The transition stage from infancy to boyhood has the following
characteristics: The child’s activity is directed more and more upon
the outer world; and along with his sense of the reality of the outer
world he begins to be a real person, and to feel himself as such. This
feeling is joined with the practical tendency to make all sorts of
experiments upon his surroundings. For this practical activity, the
child is fitted by the coming of his teeth, by his learning to stand,
walk, and speak” (3: pp. 120-121). Standing is the first requirement
by the exercise of volition. But “a still freer relation to the
outer world is attained by man through his power of walking.” The
development of speech, on the other hand, enables him to grasp things
in generalized concepts. It also leads him to the consciousness of his
own constant and total subject--to the “comprehension of his ego.”
The conscious independence of self from the nonself now dawns. “This
dawning independence first expresses itself in play with material
objects.” Hegel, however, does not like to linger long here, and
hastens to the next stage, boyhood, which constitutes “the passage of
the child from play to serious study.”
“In this transition stage children begin to be full of curiosity. They
especially delight in stories. They seek rare and strange ideas. Above
all is the awakening feeling that they are not yet what they are to
be, and the ardent wish to become like the grown-up people about them.
Out of this springs the child’s desire to imitate” (3: p. 121).
Now the child must be taught. This “feeling of dissatisfaction with
himself as he is,” this “personal aspiration for full development,”
this “wish to be ‘big’” is “the lever to be grasped by education.”
Therefore he condemns “the play education” which “meets children at a
low level,” which “looks upon what is childish as already something of
value in itself alone,” which, “attempting to make the incompleteness
of childhood seem as something complete, and to make the children
satisfied with it, casts down and tramples upon their own true better
wants.... It puts both itself and what is serious into a puerile form,
for which the children themselves feel contempt.” It also “may have
throughout the whole life of the pupil the baneful result of making him
account everything cheap.” Consequently, in learning, the child should
not be left to its own inclination or to anything like its spontaneous
interest. “What the boy is to learn must be set before him by authority
and example.” This is more according to his own nature, because his
ideal at this stage does not appear in any general or abstract form,
but is always represented by particular grown-up persons (3: pp.
121-122, 146-147).
In the Fichtean pedagogy the boy was encouraged to self-active learning
and thinking. But in the Hegelian pedagogy he is to be essentially
receptive. To talk to the boy about original thinking or independent
study is pure nonsense or tends to cultivate precocity. There is no
instruction without prescription. “Thought at the beginning, like
the will, should be obedient”; “willingness to yield one’s ideas is
the first necessity for a learner.” Thus: “The tendency of youth to
independent reflection or reasoning is one-sided. It should be indulged
in as little as possible.... For the chief end of education is to do
away with these personal ideas, thoughts, reflections of youth, and
their utterance. If the tendency toward self-reasoning be unchecked,
there is no discipline or order in thought, no coherent and consequent
knowledge” (3: pp. 140-141). Truth means objectivity. “We often
say that the understanding is developed by questioning, objecting,
responding, etc. But, in truth, the mind is not developed by these;
it is only made superficial. The inner nature of a man is broadened
by culture, and given him as a possession through self-restraint.
Thought is enriched, and the mind vitalized, by silence” (3: p. 140).
Silence (ἐχημυθία), the word borrowed from Pythagoras, is
the watchword of his instruction. Let us examine a little more fully
the content of this word. To say that it is a deepened receptivity,
an anticipatory interest, a worked out objectiveness of mind, a
self-forgetful absorption in matters presented, a preparedness to react
promptly in coming impressions, would be mere tautology. In other
words, it is nothing else than the height of disinterested attention.
Attention as understood by Hegel always involves voluntary control.
“It demands effort when one wishes to grasp one object rather than
another, to abstract himself from the thousand things moving through
his mind, from his other interests, and even from his own person; and
repressing the tendency to hasty judgment, to give himself up wholly
to the object” (3: p. 139).
From the emphasis laid on the receptivity, on strict obedience to
prescription, follows the emphasis upon order, regularity, and
punctuality, as the first requisites in instruction.
“There can be nothing worse than the evil of procrastination, of the
putting off or shirking of work, so that it is not pursued in all
earnestness and in an unchangeable order. What is undertaken to be
done at a set time should be accomplished as surely as the sun rises”
(3: p. 138).
With such an emphasis on receptivity one can easily imagine how Hegel
would regard the function of memory in learning. Although he thought
it the most difficult point in psychology “to state exactly the place
and significance of memory and its organic connection with thought,”
it was conceived as somehow opposed to subjectivity and reflection.
“Consciously or unconsciously it is ever in use.... It is busy filling
the soul with pure existences of outer space” (3: p. 135); “it is
mechanization of intelligence.” Thus better memory in youth than in
old age had, for Hegel, a certain teleological significance, and great
minds have generally good memories.
However, even for Hegel, receptive learning is not the ultimate end,
but is only propedeutic.
“It is most important to lead the boy from the state of mere
receptivity to that of personal effort. For learning, which is mere
taking in and remembering, is a very small part of education” (3: p.
144).
Again:
“If learning were to be limited to a mere taking in, its results would
be little better than writing upon the water, for it is not mere
receiving, but the self-activity of grasping, and the power to put in
use, that alone make knowledge our possession” (3: p. 141).
As to the comparative importance of various branches of study,
Hegel, as a champion of the New Humanism, opposed “the effort of
making mathematical exercises the chief subject of education” (as
the followers of Kant and Pestalozzi tried to do), considering it as
“putting the mind upon a rack in order to evolve a perfect machine,”
as “making the mind empty and dull” (3: pp. 154-155). Against mere
realistic study of natural science he exalted the value of the
classics, considering the classical worlds as the second paradise
of the human race, “the paradise of the spiritual man, who in his
beautiful spontaneity, freedom, depth, and joyousness stepped forth as
a bridegroom from his chamber”; praising their masterpieces as “the
spiritual bath, the profane baptism, which gives the soul its earliest
and most lasting taste for things of beauty and of knowledge” (3: p.
157).
As a means of cultivating abstract thinking--i. e., the power of
understanding and reasoning--Hegel exalts again, in opposition to the
preceding reformers, the study of logic and grammar, especially the
grammar of the ancient languages. “The value of grammatical study,” he
asserts, “can scarcely be overestimated, for it forms the beginning
of logical culture, a fact, however, that appears to be almost
overlooked.” He does not even hesitate to say that “careful grammatical
study is one of the most noble and universal means of culture” (3:
pp. 155-156). Various branches of philosophy, including the elements
of religion, law, ethics, and psychology, are also prescribed for the
gymnasium. Voice culture, public speaking, and the art of reading
are mentioned as the important factors in education. Instruction
in military drill is strongly advocated, as training alertness and
exact ideo-motor reaction; and consequently as “the most direct way
of counteracting a lazy absent-mindedness”; as the common ground of
pursuit which “best serves in leveling the partition wall that we
build around our callings”; finally and preëminently as “a reminder
that every man, whatever his position, should be ready to defend his
fatherland and his prince” (3: pp. 153-154).
In the notion of the school, too, Hegel takes us back to the official
and orthodox standpoint. It is simply preparation for the future life
of the matured man. It is a mere organ through which the essentials of
the acquired culture of the race are bequeathed to the new generation.
Nothing more can or should be hoped from it. “The sciences are not
enlarged by the school.... Its knowledge is old property of the
race. The work of the school has not its perfect end in itself. It
lays but the foundation for the possibility of other work, that of
real performance.... This preparation, this culture, can never be
‘finished.’ Only a certain stage of it may be attained” (3: p. 147).
School is not, like a Froebelian kindergarten, the children’s own
world. “It educates the individual to participate in the world life”;
it is “a secluded inner preparation.” This secluded period of mere
apprenticeship not only lacks such organic relation to the larger
life of the community or the warm, intimate air of family life, as
the school in the Pestalozzian conception, but it lacks, unlike
the people’s school of Fichte’s ideal, even its own completeness
and independence. Hegel complacently admits that “school life is
dispassionate; it lacks the higher interest and earnestness of real
life.” But, just the same, it is the necessary and best preparation
for life. He disapproves “the maxim that children are early to be
brought out into society.” For “men of world-wide fame have come from
the narrow gate of the monastery; while, on the contrary, men who have
grown-up amid all the externalities of life unfold little fruit of
inner worth” (3: pp. 147-149).
If silence was the first requisite of learning, so obedience is that of
morality.
“Obedience is the beginning of all wisdom. For by this the boy’s will
is brought under the reasonable will imposed from without. The boy’s
will is not yet fledged, not truly independent and free. It has not
learned to see the true, the objective, which makes for righteousness.
If children are permitted to follow their impulses, if their self-will
is unwisely yielded to, a most ugly habit of stubborn willfulness is
formed” (3: p. 122).
If our rationalistic philosopher does not put any faith in the
natural impulses of the child, he makes equally little of the child’s
individuality. He writes:
“The peculiarities of man must not be rated too highly. The assertion
that a teacher must carefully adjust himself to the individuality of
his pupil so as to develop it--this assertion is empty. The teacher
has no time for that. The individuality of the children is met in the
family. But with the school begins a life in accord with a general
order, after general rules for all. In school the spirit must be
brought to lay aside the peculiarities, it must know and will the
universal” (3: pp. 113-114).
The individual experience or consciousness never wholly reveals the
full content of the spiritual development or culture attained by the
race or the universal soul. The individual soul must, therefore, be
fed by the content of the racial soul in order to attain its fullness.
This, for Hegel, is done through the spoken word or writing. For him,
not the senses or personal experience, as the empiricists claimed,
but speech is the organ of learning. The letters of alphabets are the
beginning of instruction proper, and, “in general, speech is that airy
element, that material immateriality by means of which the widening
knowledge of the child is lifted more and more above the material and
particular to the universal, and so to thought” (3: p. 123). This
importance of instruction through speech in education applies also
to morality and religion. Unless we teach, the boy, left to himself,
would naturally gather erroneous and imperfect notions of things and
their relations. Therefore we need an early instruction in morality
and religion. Against the Rousseauean idea that children “cannot
understand them, and can gather from them only words for memory,” Hegel
asserts that they are “well understood by the child, by the boy, by the
youth, in proportion to their age.” Again:
“Our whole life is nothing else than a growing comprehension of their
range and significance. We see them exemplified in ever new cases, and
our knowledge of their many-sided meanings develops. In fact, were we
to put off the teaching of these moral ideas until a man is able to
grasp their whole meaning, very few persons need be taught, and these
not much before the end of life” (3: pp. 117-118).
Hegel had to say with Pestalozzi that “the feeling of immediate unity
with the parents is the spiritual milk upon which the children thrive”;
that “the mother should be the chief influence in early education,
for morality must be instilled into the child with his earliest
perceptions”; that she is entitled to this by her love, which alone
“flows with the whole current of her being.” This “is her highest
earthly vocation, in which her natural character and her holiest
calling are united” (3: pp. 145-146). Yet the parents are not the
all-sufficient agents for the education of the child: the school must
also have its part. As the parents have the duty and right of educating
it as a member of the family, so the state has its duty and right of
educating it as a member of society.
Now, to return to Hegel’s delineation of the stages of man, the next
stage is youth, which begins with puberty. Here “the life of the race
begins to stir within him and to seek satisfaction” (3: p. 124). The
accompanying phenomena are the sudden growth and intensification of
all his emotions and sentiments,--æsthetic, religious, and social.
“Particularly in youth do we feel ourselves related and in sympathy
with all nature. We and things about us seem alive with one soul. We
have a feeling of the world soul, of the oneness of spirit and nature,
and of the spirituality of nature” (3: p. 150).
As to personal relations, “friendship like that of Achilles and
Patroclus, or like that still closer friendship of Orestes and
Pylades, is chiefly the privilege of youth” (3: p. 151). Youth, with
its heightened sentimentality accompanied by the growing sense of the
independence of self, is preëminently the age of subjective idealism.
“His ideal no longer appears to him, as to the boy, in some person,
but is held by him as a universal, independent of such individuality.
But to the youth this ideal still has a more or less subjective form,
be it an ideal of love and friendship or one of general ambition” (3:
p. 124). In this lies the hope, inspiration, and power of the youth,
but at the same time his weakness, discouragement, and despair. “The
form of the ideal inspires the youth’s energy so that he dreams that
he is called and fitted to make the world over, or at least to turn it
back to its right course. The young man’s aspiring eye does not see
that the substantial universal contained in his ideal is already being
evolved and realized in the world. What is realized by the universal
seems to him far below the ideal. Accordingly he feels that the world
misunderstands both his ideal and himself. Thus the peace in which
the child lived with the world is broken for the youth. Because of
this turning to the ideal the youth seems to have a nobler outlook
and greater unselfishness than the man, who is interested in his
personal temporal affairs. But it must be remembered that the man is
not bound up in his personal inclinations and subjective opinions, nor
is he engaged solely in his personal advancement, but is one with the
reasonable realities about him and is active in the world’s behalf” (3:
pp. 124-125). This is the stage of objective idealism.
For Fichte, the creation of the ideal world by the power of the
subjective will, and the reshaping of actuality according to it, was
the noblest and highest destiny of man. But, according to Hegel,
this is only a transient phase of the youth, which he must outgrow,
if his growth is normal and unhindered. “The youth should shed his
horns and adjust himself, with his wishes and plans, to the actual and
rational relationships about him” (3: p. 151). This transition from
the subjective, abstract idealism of youth to the objective, concrete
idealism of manhood is often a painful process, and in many cases leads
one to an abject pessimism. “The later it is experienced the worse
are its symptoms.... He cannot conquer his repugnance to the actual,
and so finds himself relatively incapable, and may easily become so
altogether.” If, then, a man is not to succumb to the iron law of
actuality, he must recognize its independence and rationality. “He must
submit to the condition it imposes, and win from it, though it seems to
say him nay, what he will” (3: p. 125).
Thus the young man, finally coming down from his Utopian heaven,
“enters partnership with the world, and wins for himself adequate
standing room.” Although he gives up “his plan of making the world
anew,” still “there is room for honorable, far-reaching, creative
activity.” For the objective world with which he now identifies himself
is a life process, ever renewing itself and ever advancing. “The man’s
work is a part of this renewal and advancement. He grows more and more
at one with his objective relationships. He becomes accustomed to his
work.... In time he becomes perfectly at home in his calling, and gives
himself wholly to it. The essential in all the phases of his business
becomes a matter of course. Only the individual, the nonessential,
presents to him any novelty” (3: pp. 126-127).