Chapter 4: Herbart's Systematizing Teaching PDF

** Chapter 4** Herbart: Systematizing Teaching  Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841), a German professor of philosophy and psy-chology, devised an educational method that systematized instruction and encouraged the moral development of students. After observing Pestalozzi\'s method, Herbart de...

** Chapter 4** Herbart: Systematizing Teaching  Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841), a German professor of philosophy and psy-chology, devised an educational method that systematized instruction and encouraged the moral development of students. After observing Pestalozzi\'s method, Herbart decided to reorganize it into a more precise sequence. **Principles of Teaching and Learning** Herbart defined interest as a person\'s ability to bring and retain an idea in con-sciousness. He reasoned that a large mass or network of ideas generated a great number of interests. Ideas related to each other formed a network, an \"apperceptive mass,\" in the mind. Informed by Herbart\'s psychology, teachers were advised to introduce students to an increasing number of ideas and to help them construct relationships between ideas. In addition to his psychological principles, Herbart was concerned with students\' moral development. He emphasized the humanistic studies of history and literature as rich sources of moral values. By studying the lives of great men and women, students could discover how people made their moral decisions. Literature provided a framework for placing values into a humanistic perspective. Herbart was influential in bringing history and literature into the curriculum at a time it was dominated by the classical Greek and Latin languages. **Education and Schooling** Herbart wanted to systematize education and schooling by organizing instruction into a well-defined sequence of steps that teachers could follow. The five Herbartian steps were: Preparation, in which teachers prepare students to receive the new concept or material they are going to present. Presentation, in which teachers clearly identify and present the new concept. Association, in which the new concept is compared and contrasted with ideas the student already knows. Generalization, in which a general principle is formed that combines the new and previous learning. Application, in which the student\'s knowledge of the new principle is tested by appropriate examinations and exercises. 15 **Influence on Educational Practices Today** Herbart\'s method gained wide acceptance in teacher-education programs in the United States and in other countries, especially Japan. Teachers were trained to use Herbart\'s steps to systematically organize instruction. Herbart\'s view of moral 14 For a brief biography, timeline, and excerpts from Hebart\'s Outlines of Educational Doctrine, see Madonna M. Murphy, The History and Philosophy of Education: Voices of Educational Pioneers, pp. 194-201. Herbart originally developed a four-step method that was restructured by the American Herbartian educators into the five steps that were generally used in the United States. **Froebel: The Kindergarten Movement** The German educator Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) is renowned for his pioneering work in developing a school for early childhood education-the kindergarten, or children\'s garden.16 A visionary educator, Froebel\'s educational philosophy was eclectic in that it was based on a variety of ideas. Froebel, an idealist, believed that spirituality was at the core of human nature. (For more on idealism, see the chapter on Philosophical Roots of Education). Every child, he believed, possessed an interior spiritual power, a soul, striving to be externalized. Froebel constructed the kindergarten as an educational environment in which children\'s inherent but latent spirituality could be brought to the surface. A German nationalist, he believed that the people of each country, including his native land, shared a common folk spirit that manifested itself in the nation\'s stories, songs, and fables. Thus, storytelling and singing had an important place in the kindergarten program. Froebel\'s desire to become a teacher took him to Pestalozzi\'s institute at Yver-don, where from 1808 to 1810, he interned in the teacher-training program. Pestalozzi served as a mentor for Froebel. Just as Pestalozzi had revised Rousseau\'s method, Froebel revised Pestalozzi\'s method. Froebel endorsed selected aspects of Pestalozzi\'s method, such as using sensation and objects in a permissive school at-mosphere, but he believed that Pestalozzi\'s process needed a more philosophical foundation. Froebel gave Pestalozzi\'s object lesson a more symbolic meaning by asserting that the concrete object would stimulate recall of a corresponding concept in the child\'s mind. He readily accepted Pestalozzi\'s vision of schools as emotionally secure places for children but redefined the child\'s growth in spiritual terms. Like Comenius, Rousseau, and Pestalozzi, Froebel wanted teachers to be sensitive to children\'s readiness and needs rather than taskmasters who heard preset recitations and forced children to memorize words they did not understand. **Principles of Teaching and Learning** A philosophical idealist, Froebel believed that every child\'s inner self contained a spiritual essence that stimulated self-active learning. He therefore designed the kindergarten as a \"prepared environment\" in which children could externalize their interior spirituality through self-activity. Froebel\'s kindergarten, first founded in 1837 in Blankenburg, was a permissive environment featuring games, play, songs, stories, and crafts.!? The kindergarten\'s ** Importance of teacher\'s personality** songs, stories, and games, now a standard part of early childhood education, stimulated children\'s imaginations and introduced them to the culture\'s folk heroes and heroines and values. The games socialized children and developed their physical and motor skills. As the boys and girls played with other children, they became part of the group and were prepared for further socialized learning activities. 18 The curriculum also included \"gifts,\" objects with fixed form, such as spheres, cubes, and cylinders, which were intended to bring to full consciousness the underlying concept represented by the object. In addition, Froebel\'s kindergarten featured \"осси-pations,\" which consisted of materials children could shape and use in design and construction activities. For example, clay, sand, cardboard, and sticks could be manipulated and shaped into castles, cities, and mountains. 19 We form our first impressions of schools and teachers in kindergarten and carry these impressions with us throughout our lives. Froebel believed the kindergarten teacher\'s personality to be of paramount importance. Did the teacher really understand the child\'s nature and respect the dignity of the child\'s human personality? Did the teacher personify the highest cultural values so that children could imitate those values? Preservice experiences should help teachers become sensitive to children\'s needs and give them the knowledge and skills required to create caring and wholesome learning environments. Froebel would encourage kindergarten teachers to resist the contemporary pressures to introduce academic subjects into kindergartens as a premature pressure that comes from adults, often parents, rather than from the children\'s needs and readiness.20 ** Spread of the kindergarten** Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was an English social theorist whose ideas enjoyed great popularity and influence in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Amer-ica. Spencer was highly influenced by Charles Darwin\'s theory of evolution. 22 According to Darwin, species evolved naturally and gradually over long periods of time. Members of certain species survived and reproduced themselves by successfully adapting to changes in the environment. As their offspring inherited these adaptive characteristics, they too survived and continued the life of the species. Those unable to adapt-the unfit---perished.23 Spencer, a key proponent of Social Darwinism, the application of Darwin\'s biological theory to society, believed that the \"fittest\" individuals of each generation would survive because of their skill, intelligence, and adaptability. Competition, a natural ethical force, induced the best in the human species to climb to the top of the socioeconomic ladder. As winners of the competitive race over slower and duller individuals, the fittest would inherit the earth and populate it with their intelligent and productive children. Unfit individuals who were lazy, stupid, or weak would slowly disappear. According to Social Darwinism, competition would improve the human race and bring about gradual but inevitable progress.24 Spencer opposed public schools, which he argued would create a monopoly for mediocrity by catering to the average rather than the brightest in the school-age population. Private schools, in contrast, as they competed for the most able students would become centers of educational innovation. Like contemporary proponents of a voucher system, Spencer believed the best schools would attract the brightest students and the most capable teachers.25 Principles of Teaching and Learning Although a naturalist in education, Spencer defined nature very differently than Rousseau and Pestalozzi had. For him, nature meant the law of the jungle and the survival of the fittest.26 He believed that people in an industrialized society needed a utilitarian education to learn useful scientific skills and subjects. As a pioneer in modern curriculum theory, Spencer wanted education based on the activities that people needed to survive, especially the modern survival skills found in science and technology that prepared individuals to be intelligent producers and consumers in an industrial society? He found that schools historically resisted change and needed to modernize their curriculum by including more science and technology. Science emphasis Education and Schooling Spencer strongly opposed the traditional schools\' highly verbal literary and classical curriculum. The most valuable subjects, in his opinion, were the physical, biological, and social sciences as well as applied technology in fields such as engineering Today, he would add computer technology, genetics, and bioengineering to his list of useful subjects. Introducing a rationale still used in modern curriculum-making, Spencer classified human activities according to the degree to they advanced human survival, prosperity, and progress. Science was given a high priority since it applied to the effective performance of life activities. Spencer included five types of activities in the curriculum: (1) self-preservation activities, which are basic to all other activities \(2) occupational or professional activities, that make a person economically self-supporting; (3) child-rearing activities; (4) social and political participation activities; and (5) leisure and recreation activities. Influence on Educational Practices Today Impact on curriculum design American educators were receptive to Spencer\'s ideas. In 1918, a National Education Association committee, in its landmark Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, reiterated Spencer\'s list of basic life activities. Modern curriculum designers continue to reflect Spencer\'s influence when they base curriculum on human needs and activities. After dominating American social science in the late nineteenth century, Social Darwinism was pushed aside by John Dewey\'s Experimentalism and progressive reform. Key Social Darwinist ideas reemerged in the contemporary neoconservative