DEVELOPMENT OF EDUCATIONAL IDEAS 37 



rightly one must have the mother heart. His aim was to educate 

 for freedom; but he failed to see with sufficient clearness that liberty 

 involves authority, though as men become more enlightened they 

 grow more critical and appeal with increasing emphasis from author- 

 itative organizations to the aboriginal seat of conscience in the 

 individual soul. Hence the school, where the people are free and 

 intelligent, strives to make its pupils self-reliant, self-controlled, 

 and rationally obedient. 



Herbart was influenced by Pestalozzi, and though his philosophy 

 is unsound he applied psychology to the theory and practice of 

 teaching with true insight. He made it plain that the mind does 

 not gain strength and wisdom by seeing or perceiving, but by react- 

 ing on the impressions received through the senses, and by relating 

 apparently separate objects to the whole of experience, until each 

 is understood to be part of all, made what it is by causes that reach 

 back to eternity, itself a cause whose effects shall in turn become 

 causes in an unending process. This is Herbart's doctrine of apper- 

 ception which the teacher cannot meditate too attentively. It is 

 a process, not merely of identification or classification, but one in 

 which the mind sees things becoming and follows them in an endless 

 course of evolution, until the interrelation of all things is perceived, 

 and within and beyond all, the Supreme Spirit who makes, guides, 

 controls, and harmonizes all. The teacher's effort must be to make 

 his pupils understand rather than to see and remember. 



Herbart's doctrine of interest and of educational values is sug- 

 gestive and has compelled attention to questions which contributed 

 to the development of educational ideas during the last century. 

 Not less helpful is his recognition of moral life as the end of all educa- 

 tion, and of the dependence of character on thoughts and dispositions 

 which it should be the purpose of education to make habitual. 

 Froebel's doctrine that education is conscious evolution, to promote 

 which the whole environment, spiritual and physical, should be made 

 to contribute, has had a wholesome influence on pedagogical thought. 

 His kindergarten idea, however, while it springs from a real view, 

 easily leads to the employment of methods which stimulate pre- 

 cociousness, make genuine work distasteful, and by confining the 

 attention of children to the things immediately about them, enfeeble 

 the imagination. There is also danger of impoverishing the sources 

 of life by too early and too persistent appeals to self-conscious- 

 ness. 



The democratic movement which gave to the nineteenth century 

 its most distinctive feature sprang from an increasing sense of the 

 worth of the individual and led to more comprehensive notions of 

 his rights and duties. Individualism in the matter of education 

 found its completest expression in the writings of Goethe. Nature 



