CHAPTER IX

INFLUENCE OF COMENIUS ON MODERN EDUCATORS

Francke—Early educational undertakings—The institution at Halle—Character of the pædagogium—Impulse given to modern learning. Rousseau—The child the centre of educational schemes—Sense training fundamental—Order and method of nature to be followed. Basedow—Protests against traditional methods—Influenced by the _Émile_—His educational writings—The Philanthropinum. Pestalozzi—Love the key-note of his system—Domestic education—Education for all classes and sexes—The study of nature—Impulse given to the study of geography. Fröbel—His relations to Comenius and Pestalozzi—Educational value of play and principle of self-activity—Women as factors in education. Herbart—Assimilation of sense-experience—Training of character—Doctrine of interest.

It is less easy to trace the influence of Comenius on modern educational reformers than to indicate the traces of his pedagogic development, since he read widely and credited cheerfully the paternity of his educational ideals. He says in this connection: “I gave my mind to the perusal of divers authors, and lighted upon many which at this age have made a beginning in reforming the method of studies, as Ratke, Helwig, Rheinus, Ritter, Glaum, Cæcil, and, who indeed should have the first place, John Valentine Andreæ, a man of noble and clear brain; as also Campanella and the Lord Verulam, those famous restorers of philosophy; by reading of whom I was raised in good hope, that at last those so many various sparks would conspire into a flame; yet observing here and there some defects and gaps, I could not contain myself from attempting something that might rest upon an immovable foundation, and which, if it could be once found out, should not be subject to any ruin. Therefore, after many workings and tossings of my thoughts, by reducing everything to the immovable laws of nature, I lighted upon my _Great didactic_, which shows the art of teaching all things to all men.”

Such commendable frankness is not always found in the reformers that follow Comenius; but in their writings it is not difficult to discern community of ideas first definitely formulated by Comenius. This holds true in a degree of all reformers since Comenius’ day, but in a measure sufficiently large to require passing note in Francke, Rousseau, Basedow Pestalozzi, Fröbel, and Herbart.

_Francke_[39]

Of a profoundly religious nature like Comenius, Francke applied himself to the study of theology at the Universities of Kiel and Leipzig, after having studied at Erfurt. The listless and heartless character of the teaching and study at these institutions impressed him profoundly, and directed his attention to the need of educational reform. Four years after taking his degree at Leipzig (1688), he established an infant school at Hamburg, which, though brief, was, as he tells us, the richest and happiest experience of his long and varied career. It taught him the lesson which he thought was needed alike by himself and his contemporaries— that teachers of little children entered upon their work with altogether too little preparation. He says, “Upon the establishment of this school, I learned how destructive is the usual school management, and how exceedingly difficult is the discipline of children; and this reflection made me desire that God would make me worthy to do something for the improvement of schools and instruction.”

He received an ecclesiastical call to Erfurt, which he accepted, but his orthodoxy was questioned and he was not permitted to fill the office to which he had been appointed. The foundation of the University of Halle, in 1691, made an opening for him in the chair of Greek and Oriental languages. While serving in this capacity, he organized the philanthropic institution which has made Halle famous. It began as a charity work among the poor, and grew to such proportions that at his death, in 1727,—thirty-three years after its inception,—it included (1) the pædagogium with eighty-two students and seventy teachers and pupil-teachers; (2) the Latin school of the orphanage with three inspectors, thirty-two teachers, four hundred pupils, and ten servants; (3) elementary schools in Halle for the children of citizens, employing four inspectors, ninety-eight male and eight female teachers, and having an enrollment of one thousand and twenty-five children; (4) apothecary shops and bookstores. As a charity school, Francke’s institution became the model of hundreds organized in Europe during the next century.

The pædagogium, which was a part of the great philanthropic institution, was opened in 1696, as a select school for the sons of noblemen. It was one of the earliest training schools for teachers, and the forerunner of university pedagogical seminaries, which, in Germany at least, serve as training schools for teachers in secondary schools. Francke aimed to fit young men, and particularly university students, in the faculties of philosophy and theology, for greater usefulness as teachers. Indeed, much of the teaching in the pædagogium was done by the university students who contemplated teaching careers. Besides the practice work, instruction was given in the history and theory of education, methods of teaching, and school organization and government. Francke’s pædagogium was a worthy progenitor of the long line of renowned university seminaries which are now integral factors of the German universities, such, for example, as the deservedly noted pedagogical seminary at Jena under the direction of Professor Wilhelm Rein, and the not less noted pedagogical seminaries at Leipzig under Professors Volkelt, Schiller, and Richter.

Like Comenius, Francke valued less the classical culture, but more the modern learning which fitted for the duties of life. “It is a common evil,” he says, “that we do not teach what we use in our occupations every day.” This led him to give large consideration to the study of the mother-tongue. “I find few university students,” he says, “who can write a German letter correctly spelled. They violate orthography in almost every line. I know of many examples where, after they have entered upon the ministry and have had occasion to have something printed, it has been necessary to have their manuscripts first corrected in almost every line. The reason for this defect is usually in the schools, where only the Latin translation of their exercises is corrected, but not the German.” In many ways he labored to actualize the larger idea of education which Comenius had outlined in the _Great didactic_.

_Rousseau_

While he does not mention Comenius by name, even a cursory reading of the _Émile_[40] furnishes abundant evidence of Rousseau’s familiarity with the writings of the Moravian reformer, if not at first hand, then through the writings of others. At any rate, some striking parallels are suggested in a comparative study of the writings of the two reformers. As summarized by Mr. Davidson,[41] Rousseau’s educational demands are threefold: (1) the demand that children should, from the moment of their birth, be allowed complete freedom of movement; (2) that they should be educated through direct experience, and not through mere information derived from books; (3) that they should be taught to use their hands in the production of useful articles. These demands, it will be recalled, were also made by Comenius in one form or another.

Comenius and Rousseau both emphasized the fact that school systems must be made for children, and not children for school systems. Neither reformer shared the schoolmaster’s customary contempt for childhood, but both urged that childhood must be studied and loved to be understood and trained, and both, if they had lived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, would have been enthusiastic advocates of child study. Says Rousseau: “We do not understand childhood, and pursuing false ideas of it, our every step takes us farther astray. The wisest among us fix upon what it concerns men to know, without ever considering what children are capable of learning. They always expect to find the man in the child, without thinking of what the child is before it is a man.... We never know how to put ourselves in the place of children; we do not enter into their ideas; we attribute to them our own; and following always our own train of thought, even with syllogisms, we manage to fill their heads with nothing but extravagance and error.... I wish some discreet person would give us a treatise on the art of observing children—an art which would be of immense value to us, but of which parents and teachers have not as yet learnt the very rudiments.”

Sense training was fundamental in Comenius’ scheme of primary education. Nature studies—plants, animals, and minerals—were introduced from the first, that the child might early cultivate his powers of observation, and form the habit of acquiring knowledge at first hand. Rousseau likewise lays great stress on sense training. “The faculties which become strong in us,” he says, “are our senses. These, then, are the first that should be cultivated; they are, in fact, the only faculties we forget, or at least those which we neglect most completely. The child wants to touch and handle everything. By no means check this restlessness; it points to a very necessary apprenticeship. Thus it is that the child gets to be conscious of the hotness or coldness, the hardness or softness, the heaviness or lightness of bodies, to judge of their size and shape and all their sensible properties by looking, feeling, listening, especially by comparing sight and touch, and combining the sensations of the eye with those of the fingers.”

Comenius, Rousseau, and, in fact, all the realists from Bacon to Herbert Spencer, have emphasized the thought that education should follow the order and method of nature; though, as Professor Payne suggests, it is not always easy to form a clear notion of what they mean by nature, when they say that education should be natural, and that teachers should follow the method of nature. The key-note of Rousseau’s theory, as expressed in the opening paragraph of the _Émile_, is that “everything is good as it comes from the hands of the author of nature, but everything degenerates in the hands of man.” Mr. Davidson points out in his study of Rousseau that the air was full of nature panaceas during the middle years of the eighteenth century, and that these were applied alike to social, political, and educational institutions. He says: “The chief of these notions were (1) a state of nature as man’s original condition—a state conceived sometimes as one of goodness, peace, freedom, equality, and happiness, sometimes as one of badness, war, slavery, inequality, and misery; (2) a law of nature independent of all human enactment, and yet binding upon all men; (3) a social contract, voluntarily and consciously made, as the basis of justification for civil society and authority—a contract by which men united for the protection of rights and the enforcement of laws which had existed already in the state of nature; (4) false inequality among men, as due to private property, or the usurpation by some of what, by natural right, belonged to all; (5) a peaceful, untroubled, unenterprising, unstruggling existence as the normal form of human life.”

While less sane, less practical, less comprehensive in his educational views than Comenius, it can scarcely be said that he was less influential. Differing in many important particulars, a common ideal permeates the writings of the two reformers—an unbounded faith in the possibilities of youth, and a deep conviction that it is the business of teachers to view the world and nature from the standpoint of young and growing children, and to cling with less tenacity to points of view established by antiquity and convention.

_Basedow_[42]

While resembling Rousseau more than Comenius in temperament and character, as well as in educational ideals, there is yet much in Basedow’s educational scheme that recalls the Moravian reformer. Born at Hamburg, in 1727, he experienced, like Rousseau, an unhappy childhood, and, like Comenius, received a belated education. He prepared for the University of Leipzig at the Hamburg gymnasium; but at both institutions he rebelled against the traditional methods of instruction. After completing the course in theology at Leipzig, it was found that he had grown too heterodox for ordination, and he engaged himself as a private tutor to a gentleman in Holstein. Remarkable success attended his labors as a teacher. He studied his children, adapted subject-matter to their capacities, and made extensive use of conversational methods. This experience secured him an appointment in Denmark, where he taught for eight years. But his essays on _Methodical instruction in natural and Biblical religion_ disturbed alike the serenity of the Danish clergy and schoolmasters, and he was released and called to the gymnasium at Altoona, where he encountered opposition no less pronounced.

Rousseau’s _Émile_ appeared at this time, and it influenced him powerfully. He renewed his attacks on contemporary educational practices; charged universal neglect of physical education and the mother-tongue; criticised the schools for devoting so much time to the study of Latin and Greek, and for the mechanical and uninteresting methods employed in teaching these languages; and admonished society for neglecting to instruct the children of the poor and middle classes. Raumer, who is no admirer of Basedow, admits the justice of the charges. He says: “Youth was in those days for most children a sadly harassed period. Instruction was hard and heartlessly severe. Grammar was caned into the memory; so were portions of Scripture and poetry. A common form of school punishment was to learn by heart the One Hundred and Nineteenth Psalm. Schoolrooms were dismally dark. No one conceived it possible that the young could find pleasure in any kind of work, or that they had eyes for aught but reading and writing. The pernicious age of Louis XIV had inflicted on the children of the upper class hair curled by the barber and messed with powder and pomade, braided coats, knee breeches, silk stockings, and a dagger by the side—for active, lively children a perfect torture.”

The publication, in 1774, of his _Elementary book with plates_ and his _Book of methods_ for parents and teachers, formulated and brought to public notice his views on education. The _Elementary book with plates_ followed closely the lines of Comenius, and it has often been called the _Orbis pictus_ of the eighteenth century. The purpose of the book was clearly encyclopædic. As stated by himself, his aims were: (1) elementary instruction in the knowledge of words and things; (2) an incomparable method, founded upon experience, of teaching children to read without weariness or loss of time; (3) natural knowledge; (4) knowledge of morals, the mind, and reasoning; (5) a thorough and impressive method of instructing in natural religion, and for a description of beliefs so impartial that it shall not appear of what belief is the writer himself; (6) knowledge of social duties and commerce. The work was published in four volumes and illustrated by one hundred plates.

The _Book of methods_ presents the root-ideas of Comenius and Rousseau. In it he says: “You should attend to nature in your children far more than to art. The elegant manners and usages of the world are, for the most part, unnatural. These come of themselves in later years. Treat children like children, that they may remain the longer uncorrupted. A boy whose acutest faculties are his senses, and who has no perception of anything abstract, must first of all be made acquainted with the world as it presents itself to the senses. Let this be shown him in nature herself, or, where this is impossible, in faithful drawings or models. Thereby can he, even in play, learn how the various objects are to be named. Comenius alone has pointed out the right road in this matter. By all means reduce the wretched exercises of the memory.”

The institution which carried Basedow’s educational theories into practice was the Philanthropinum at Dessau, which became both famous and notorious in the days of the founder, and exercised, withal, a powerful influence on the pedagogy of Germany and Switzerland during the last quarter of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. Whatever may have been its faults, it had the merit of looking at education from a more modern standpoint. With the conviction that the final word had not been spoken on pedagogy, Basedow boldly determined to find new methods of approach to the child’s mind. As an experiment the Philanthropinum was both interesting and suggestive. Kant, who recognizes this aspect of its utility, says: “It was imagined that experiments in education were not necessary; but this was a great mistake. Experience shows very often that results are produced precisely the opposite to those which had been expected. We also see from experiments that one generation cannot work out a complete plan of education. The only experimental school which has made a beginning toward breaking the path is the institution at Dessau. Whatever its faults, this praise must be given it: It is the only school in which teachers have had the liberty to work out their own methods and plans, and where they stood in connection, not only with each other, but with men of learning throughout all Germany.”

In subjects taught, as well as in methods of teaching, Basedow followed Comenius in the main. Words were taught in connection with things; object teaching occupied an important place; pictures were extensively used; children were first taught to speak and later to write in foreign languages; German and French held positions of honor; arithmetic, geometry, geography, and natural history were all taught; great attention was given to the physical development of the children, and play was considered as important as Latin; school hours were shortened; the discipline was much less severe; and the children were allowed and permitted to take degrees of freedom altogether unheard of before Basedow’s day.

_Pestalozzi_[43]

Pestalozzi was not widely read in the literature of education; in fact, the _Émile_ was about the only such book he ever read, as he himself tells us. It is, nevertheless, apparent that he was quite as much influenced by Comenius as by Rousseau. The vital principle of his reforms—love of and sympathy for the child—had been as forcefully enunciated by Comenius as by Rousseau; and the saner and more practical character of Pestalozzi’s enthusiasm would lead one to suppose that he was less influenced by the author of the _Émile_ than by the Moravian reformer. “The first qualification for the task [of teaching],” says Pestalozzi, in a letter to Greaves,[44] “is _thinking love_.” And this spirit dominated all his efforts in behalf of educational reform. He says: “It is recorded that God opened the heavens to the patriarch of old, and showed him a ladder leading thither. This ladder is let down to every descendant of Adam; it is offered to your child. But he must be taught to climb it—not by the cold calculations of the head, or by the mere impulses of the heart, but by a combination of both.”

Both reformers started with the child at birth, and made domestic education fundamental to their schemes. “Maternal love,” says Pestalozzi, “is the first agent in education. Nature has qualified the mother to be the chief factor in the education of the child.” In _How Gertrude teaches her children_[45] he tells us, “It is the main design of my method to make home instruction again possible to our neglected people, and to induce every mother whose heart beats for her child to make use of my elementary exercises.” Again, in the account of his school at Stanz, he says: “My aim was to simplify teaching so that the common people might be induced to begin the instruction of their children, and thus render superfluous the teaching of the elements in the schools. As the mother is the first to nourish her child physically, so also, by the appointment of God, she must be the first to give it spiritual and mental nourishment. I consider that very great evils have been occasioned by sending children too early to school; and by adopting so many artificial means of educating them away from home. The time will come, so soon as we shall have simplified instruction, when every mother will be able to teach, without the help of others, and thereby, at the same time, go on herself always learning.” This, it will be recalled, was also Comenius’ cherished desire in the _School of infancy_.

Comenius and Pestalozzi stand almost alone among the great educational reformers in proclaiming the doctrine of universal education—training for the poor as well as the rich, for the lowly born as well as for the privileged classes, for girls as well as boys. “Popular education,” says Pestalozzi, “once lay before me like an immense marsh, in the mire of which I waded about, until I had discovered the source from which its waters sprang, as well as the causes by which their free course is obstructed, and made myself acquainted with those points from which a hope of draining its pools might be conceived. Ever since my youthful days, the course of my feelings, which rolled on like a mighty stream, was directed to this one point,—to stop the sources of that misery in which I saw the people around me immersed.” Such regeneration he thought could be brought about by consecrated and intelligent schoolmasters, and particularly, as G. Stanley Hall notes in his admirable introduction to the American translation of _Leonard and Gertrude_,[46] “by the love and devotion of noble women overflowing from the domestic circle into the community, by the good Gertrudes of all stations in life, the born educators of the race, whose work and whose ‘key-words’ we men pedagogues must ponder well if our teaching is to be ethically inspired.”

The study of nature, and this at first hand, was likewise an inheritance from Comenius. Pestalozzi makes observation the basis of all knowledge. “If I look back and ask myself what I have really done toward the improvement of methods of elementary instruction, I find that in recognizing observation as the absolute basis of all knowledge, I have established the first and most important principle of instruction. I have endeavored to discover what ought to be the character of the instruction itself, and what are the fundamental laws according to which the education of the human race must be determined by nature.”

Comenius was the first of the educational reformers to recognize the importance of geography as a subject of school study; and although he had it taught in the schools he conducted, and gave it important consideration in his educational schemes, the study received no fresh recognition until the time of Pestalozzi. At Stanz, at Burgdorf, and at Yverdon, geography ranked as one of the foremost elementary school studies. And not only was geography taught in the schoolrooms, but better than that, it was taught in the open air. Vulliemin, who was two years a student under Pestalozzi at Yverdon, writes: “The first elements of geography were taught us on the ground. We began the study by taking a walk along a narrow valley on the outskirts of Yverdon. We were led to observe all its details, and then to help ourselves to some clay we found there. This we carried back in our baskets, and, on our return home, we had to make a model of the ground walked over, and of the surrounding country; this we did on long tables. Our walks were extended, from time to time, and, on our return, we added new features as we learned them.”

Pestalozzi was fortunate in having with him at Yverdon two eminently successful German teachers, who comprehended his aims, and who subsequently applied his methods in the fatherland. One was Hennig, the author of a popular pedagogic work on home geography, and the other was Karl Ritter, the deservedly renowned German geographer. Ritter brought with him to Yverdon two young men from Frankfort whom he was tutoring, and he served Pestalozzi in the capacity of a pupil-teacher; and, while a developed man when he entered the institution, in 1807, he came to Yverdon, as so many other enthusiastic Germans had done, to study pedagogy with the most distinguished master of the century. Years later, when Ritter had become the best-known geographer of his age, he wrote: “Pestalozzi knew less geography than a child in one of our primary schools, yet it was from him that I gained my chief knowledge of this science; for it was in listening to him that I first conceived the idea of the natural method. It was he who opened the way to me, and I take pleasure in attributing whatever value my work may have entirely to him.”

Comenius and Pestalozzi had much in common in their aims as educational reformers; and they together share, as Dr. Hoffmeister[47] points out, the honor of having originated and carefully elaborated one of the most efficient elementary school systems in Europe—the Volksschule in Germany. Pestalozzi gave himself to education, or, to use his own significant characterization, “I have lived all my days like a beggar, that I might teach beggars how to live like men.” Comenius gave himself, also, and he gave besides a half-dozen books, which take classic rank in the permanent literature of education.

_Fröbel_

The large obligations of the founder of the kindergarten to both Comenius and Pestalozzi cannot be gainsaid. Fröbel’s attention was called to the writings of the Moravian reformer early in his educational career by Professor Krause, Herder, and others interested in his schemes. “Comenius proposes an entirely new basis of education,” Professor Krause wrote to Fröbel. “He attempts to find a method of education, consciously based upon science, whereby teachers will teach less, and learners will learn more; whereby there will be less noise in the schools, less distaste, fewer idle pupils, more happiness and progress; whereby confusion, division, and darkness will give place to order, intelligence, and peace.” He adds, “Comenius was the first to advocate Pestalozzi’s doctrine of observation (Anschauung).” Mr. Hauschmann,[48] one of Fröbel’s biographers, remarks: “Krause looked upon Fröbel as the educational successor of Comenius and Pestalozzi. Fröbel, he thought, might show, as it had never been shown before, how the Pestalozzian doctrine of Anschauung was to be applied to the education of every child.”

The weeks spent with Pestalozzi in the autumn of 1805 and the two subsequent years (1808–1810) passed with him at Yverdon, gave Fröbel ample opportunity to study thoroughly the Swiss reformer’s theories and practices; and these he subsequently applied with even greater skill than his master had done. Schmid, the German historian of education, says, “Fröbel, the pupil of Pestalozzi, and a genius like his master, completed the reformer’s system; taking the results at which Pestalozzi had arrived through the necessities of his position, Fröbel developed the ideas involved in them, not by further experience, but by deduction from the nature of man, and thus he attained to the conception of true human development and to the requirements of true education.”

He was thus, in a sense, the combined product of the philosophy of Comenius and the zeal of Pestalozzi, although working along lines carefully marked out by himself. It does not detract from the fame of Fröbel to say that most of the root-ideas of his kindergarten are to be found in the _School of infancy_. Mr. Bowen, who has given us one of the best expositions[49] of Fröbel’s ideas, pays a just tribute of the obligation of his master to the writings of Pestalozzi and Comenius. He says: “With all his enthusiasm for education and his desire to found it on a scientific basis, Comenius had but little scientific knowledge of child-nature, and troubled himself not at all to acquire it. He constantly insisted, it is true, upon the exercise of the senses, and an education in accordance with nature; but his exercise of the senses soon reduced itself, in the main, to the use of pictures, with a view to a readier and more intelligent acquirement of language; and, even in his _ergastula literaria_, or literary workshop, the manual and other work introduced was intended to aid poor children in partly getting their own living while at school, rather than to exercise faculty; while his ‘nature’ was as quaint and conventional as that in a pre-Raphaelite picture. _None the less, however, Comenius was the true founder of educational method._”

There is entire agreement in a few of the most fundamental aims of the two reformers. Comenius, no less than Fröbel, preached the gospel of self-activity, and demanded that play be given important consideration in the training of the child. What Comenius says on these subjects has already been given in the exposition of the _School of infancy_. In his _Education of man_,[50] Fröbel says: “Play is the purest, most spiritual activity of the child at this period; and, at the same time, typical of human life as a whole—of the hidden natural life in man and all things. It gives, therefore, joy, freedom, contentment, inner and outer rest, peace with the world. A child that plays thoroughly, with self-active determination, perseveringly, until physical fatigue forbids, will surely be a thorough, determined man, capable of self-sacrifice for the promotion of the welfare of himself and others. Is not the most beautiful expression of child-life at this time a playing child?—a child wholly absorbed in his play?—a child that has fallen asleep while so absorbed?... The plays of the child contain the germ of the whole life that is to follow; for the man develops and manifests himself in play, and reveals the noblest aptitudes and the deepest elements of his being.”

Fröbel joined with Comenius in demanding that women shall take a responsible part in the education of the child. Mr. James L. Hughes[51] says in this connection: “The greatest step made toward the full recognition of woman’s individuality and responsibility since the time of Christ was made when Fröbel founded his kindergartens and made women educators outside the home—educators by profession. This momentous reform gave the first great impetus to the movement in favor of women’s freedom, and provided for the general advance of humanity to a higher plane by giving childhood more considerate, more sympathetic, and more stimulating teachers.” Fröbel was convinced that women were better adapted than men for the early stages of instruction. He says: “All agree that, compared with the true mother, the formal educator is but a bungler. But she must become conscious of her own aim, and must learn intelligently the means to reach it. She can no longer afford to squander or neglect the earliest years of her child. As the world grows older, we become richer in knowledge and art. But childhood remains short as before.”

In other important particulars Fröbel owed much to Comenius, as well as to Pestalozzi. Compare, for example, the _School of infancy_ with the aims of the kindergarten, and the bequests of the Moravian reformer will at once be apparent. The exaggerated and unpedagogic symbolism, however, with which Fröbel burdened his otherwise excellent kindergarten system, formed no part of his heritage from Comenius.

_Herbart_

Professor De Garmo,[52] who has given us a most succinct statement of Herbart’s educational views, remarks, “that one of the main results of Comenius, Rousseau, and Pestalozzi is the firmly fixed conviction that observation, or the use of the senses, and, in general, the consideration of simple concrete facts in every field of knowledge, is the sure foundation upon which all right elementary education rests. This truth is now the acknowledged starting-point of all scientific methods of teaching. Yet the fact of importance of observation in instruction does not carry with it any information showing how the knowledge so obtained can be utilized, or what its nature, time, amount, and order of presentation should be. In short, it does not show how mental assimilation can best take place, or how the resulting acquisitions can be made most efficiently to influence the emotional and volitional sides of our nature. Perception is, indeed, the first stage of cognition, but its equally important correlative is apperception and assimilation. It is Herbart and his successors who have made us distinctly conscious of this fact.” There can be no reasonable doubt but that Herbart did give a powerful impulse to the judicious assimilation of acquired sense-experience; and yet even here it is quite possible to underestimate the character and value of the nature studies of Comenius and the object lessons of Pestalozzi.

Herbart, like Comenius, emphasized the necessary effect of all instruction on character. “The circle of thought,” says Herbart, “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. Further, it contains the store upon which all the workings of prudence are founded—in it are the knowledge and care, without which man cannot pursue his aims through means. The whole inner activity, indeed, has its abode in the circle of thought. Here is found the initiative life, the primal energy; here all must circulate easily and freely, everything must be in its place, ready to be found and used at any moment; nothing must lie in the way, and nothing like a heavy load impede useful activity.” Indeed, as Kern suggests, in Herbart’s scheme interest is the moral monitor and protector against the servitude that springs from passions and desires.

The doctrine of interest, but vaguely suggested by Comenius, is perhaps the most noteworthy contribution of Herbart to modern pedagogy; but to summarize Herbart’s views on interest would be to summarize his whole theory of education. He recognizes two groups of interests—intellectual and social. Two phases of intellectual interests are distinguished: (1) empirical interests, or the pleasures occasioned by disinterested curiosity; (2) speculative interests occasioned by the impulse to search out causal relations; and (3) æsthetic interests aroused through beauties in nature, art, and character. The social interests are likewise threefold: (1) sympathetic or altruistic; (2) social and fraternal; and (3) religious.

Herbart’s contribution to empirical psychology, although important, was second to his application of direct pedagogic problems to actual school practice—the working out of his doctrine of many-sided interest, the selection and adjustment of materials of instruction, and the reform of school government and discipline.[53]