Johann Friedrich Herbart Quotes on Knowledge
Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), Kant's eventual successor in the chair at Königsberg and the founder of the realist alternative to the post-Kantian idealisms of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, gave nineteenth-century philosophy of mind its most ambitious mathematical psychology in the two-volume Psychology as a Science (1824–25). The framework treats the contents of consciousness as discrete representations whose interactions — fusions, repressions, into-the-threshold-and-back-out movements — can be subjected to a quantitative dynamics, and the corresponding theory of apperception supplies the philosophical infrastructure of the Herbartian pedagogical tradition that dominated the nineteenth-century European training of teachers.
Quotes
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Attributed to Johann Friedrich Herbart:
“Pedagogy without philosophy is mere routine.”
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Attributed to Johann Friedrich Herbart:
“The aim of education is the formation of moral character.”
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Attributed to Johann Friedrich Herbart:
“Mind is the interplay of presentations that struggle and combine.”
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Attributed to Johann Friedrich Herbart:
“All philosophy is the elaboration of concepts; this is its quiet but enduring task.”
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“The intention with which the educator is to approach his work, this practical reflection, provisionally detailed down to the measures which our present state of knowledge suggests we should choose, is to my mind the first half of pedagogics. But there must be a second in which the possibility of education is theoretically explained and presented with its limitations in the light of changing circumstances.”
Herbart (1982b, p. 22), as cited in: Norbert Hilgenheger, "Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841)." Kwartalnik Pedagogiczny 3-4 (1999): 5-26. -
“The intention with which the educator is to approach his work, this practical reflection, provisionally detailed down to the measures which our present state of knowledge suggests we should choose, is to my mind the first half of pedagogics. But there must be a second in which the possibility of education is theoretically explained and presented with its limitations in the light of changing circum”
Herbart (1982b, p. 22), as cited in: Norbert Hilgenheger, "Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841)." Kwartalnik Pedagogiczny 3-4 (1999): 5-26. -
“It is of course a familiar precept that the teacher must try to arouse the interest of his pupils in all that he teaches. However, this precept is generally meant and understood to denote the idea that learning is the end and interest the means to attain it. I wish to reverse that relationship. Learning must serve the purpose of creating interest. Learning is transient, but interest must be lifelong.”
Herbart (1982c, p. 97), as cited in: Norbert Hilgenheger, "Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841)." Kwartalnik Pedagogiczny 3-4 (1999): 5-26. -
“It is of course a familiar precept that the teacher must try to arouse the interest of his pupils in all that he teaches. However, this precept is generally meant and understood to denote the idea that learning is the end and interest the means to attain it. I wish to reverse that relationship. Learning must serve the purpose of creating interest. Learning is transient, but interest must be lifelo”
Herbart (1982c, p. 97), as cited in: Norbert Hilgenheger, "Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841)." Kwartalnik Pedagogiczny 3-4 (1999): 5-26.