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It is too late to sound the retreat. The educational reformers have battled stoutly for three hundred years for just the course of study that we are now beginning to accept. The edict can not be revoked, that every child is entitled to an harmonious and equable development of all its human powers, or as Herbart calls it, a harmonious culture of many-sided interests.
It was almost inevitable that speculative minds, starting from this point, should diverge into one or other of three courses; either following the line of the "subject" exclusively, and treating the "object" as a superfluous incumbrance, so as to reach, as Schulz and Maimon did, a pure Subjective Idealism, akin to utter Skepticism; or following the line of the "object," and giving it greater prominence than it had in the system of Kant, so as to lay the foundation, as Jacobi and Herbart did, of a system of Objective Certitude; or keeping both in view, and attempting, as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel did, to blend the two into one, so as to reduce them to systematic unity.
Upon this is also based psychologically the whole educational plan of Herbart and of his disciples. As fast as ideas are gained they are used as means of further acquisition. The chief care is to supply the mind of a child at any stage of his growth with materials of knowledge suited to his previous stores, and to see that the new is properly assimilated by the old and organized with it.
Herbart endeavors, as we have seen, to deduce the various mental activities from the play of representations, Feeling and desire are not something beside representations, are not special faculties of the soul, but results of the relations of representations, changing states of representations arrested and working upward against hindrances.
Herbart projected a system of ethics, based on psychology, with the intention of classifying the chief moral notions and of showing their relation to each other. He also developed a theory of the origin of moral ideas and their best means of cultivation, and then based his system of pedagogy upon it. The chief classes of ethical ideas of Herbart are briefly explained as follows: 1. Good will.
For the inbred naturalism of the modern period has not only asserted itself, amalgamated with Kantian elements, in the realistic metaphysics and mechanical psychology of Herbart and in the system of Schopenhauer, as a lateral current by the side of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, but, under the influence of the new and powerful development of the natural sciences, has once more confidently risen against the traditions of the idealistic school, although now it is tempered by criticism and concedes to the practical ideals at least a refuge in faith.
In thus referring all mental action and growth to experience, in the narrow limits he draws for the original powers of the mind, Herbart stands opposed to the older and to many more recent psychologists. He has been called the father of empirical psychology.
And this trend, without doubt, is in contrast to that of the past, which was governed by speculative psychology, on which the whole of the educational methods commonly in use in schools has hitherto been based. It was Herbart who used the philosophical psychology of his day as a guiding principle to reduce pedagogic rules to a system.
That which blinded Herbart to these limitations was that tendency toward unity, which, as a metaphysician and moral philosopher, he had all too willfully suppressed, and which now took revenge for this infringement of its rights by misleading the psychologist to an exaggeration which had important consequences. Nevertheless his unsuccessful attempt remains interesting and worthy of gratitude.
Ziller, as a disciple of Herbart, was the first to lay out a course of study for the common school with history materials as a central series, based upon the idea of the culture epochs. Since religious instruction drawn from the Old and New Testament has always been an important study in German schools, he established a double historical series.
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