Herbart

Abstract

WHEN Johann Friedrich Herbart¹ was born in 1776 Rousseau was still alive; he died in 1841, only eighteen years before the birth of Dewey. As with so many of the ‘Great Educators’ the clue to many of his opinions is to be found in the details of his upbringing. His father, a judicial and administrative councillor in the small Hanoverian town of Oldenburg, was a diligent, rather frosty man, with no gift for radiating family warmth. By contrast, his mother, the energetic if charmless daughter of a local physician, had been ‘born to command’, and as long as she lived played an abnormally large part in her son’s affairs: in 1794, when he went to the University of Jena at the age of eighteen, she insisted on accompanying him! Until he was twelve his education had been conducted at home by her and by a tutor, Hermann Uelzen, whose philosophical bent awoke an early interest in Herbart for ethics, metaphysics and psychology; the boy also displayed a remarkable memory and talent both for composing and performing music. For six years thereafter he attended the Latin school at Oldenburg; several years younger than most of his classmates, he proved zealous and successful in his studies.