The Elements of General Method, Based on the Principles of Herbart

e variety of knowledge. History, for example, is a series and collocation of facts explainable on the basis of cause and effect, a development. On the other hand, history is intimately rel

istory should ignore its blood relati

them into the daily service of school studies. It is just as important to bind up home experience with arithmetic, language, and other studies as it is to see the connection between geography and hist

to its circle of operations. To imagine a character without feeling and will would be like thinking a watch without a mainspring. All knowledge properly taught generates feeling. The will is steadily laying out, during the formative period of education, the highways

centrating nucleus, like the hub in a wheel, or whether all studies and experience are to be brought into an organic whole of related parts. It is evident that

fe so much as the means for fortifying that original stronghold of character which rests upon native mental characteristics and early home influences. We have in mind not the objective unity of different studie

nner the unity of the personality originates. Now, psychology teaches that the personality, the ego, is not something original, but something that must be first developed and is also changeable and variable. The ego is nothing else than a psychological phenomenon, namely, the consciousness of an interchange between the parts of an extensive complex of ideas, or the reference of all our ideas and of the other psychical states springing out of them to each other. Experience teaches this. In infancy the ego, the personality, is consciously realized in one person sooner, in another later. In the different ages of l

mes painfully surprised to see how the same mind may be lifted by exalted sentiments and depressed by the opposite. The frequent examples that come to notice of men of superiority and virtue along certain lines, who give way to weakness and wrong in other directions, are sufficient evidence that good and evil may be systematically cultivated in the same character, and that instead of unity and harmony education may collect in the soul heterogeneous and warring elements which make it a battle ground for life. All such disharmony and con

at variance with the best influence of the school. If possible the teacher should draw the home and school into a closer bond so as to get a better grasp of the situation and of its remedy. The school will fail to leave an effective impress upon such a child unless it can get a closer hold upon the sym

the discussion of relative values can furnish will be needed in selecting the different lines of appropriate study a

ge, mathematics, and drawing are but the formal side and expression of the two realms of real knowledge, we have the broad outlines of any true course of education. In more definitely laying out the parts of this course the natural interests and capacities of children in their successive periods

ts by fixing the relations. Most teachers will admit that each lesson should be a collection of connected facts and that every science should consist of a series of derivative and mutually dependent lessons. And yet the study and mastery of arithmetic as a connection of closely related principles is not generally appreciated. W

as it were. The problem appears in two phases: 1. Taking the school studies as they now are, is it desirable to pay more attention to the natural connections between such studies as reading, geography, history, and language, to open up frequent communicating avenues between the various branches of educational work? 2. Or if concentration is regarded as still more important, shall the subject matter of school studies be rearranged and the lessons in diffe

to the mind which have at some time made a strong impression and which possess numerous connections with other thoughts.' And psychology teaches that those ideas which take an isolated station in the mind are usually weak in the impression they make, and are easily forgotten. A fact, however important in itself, if learned without reference to other facts, is quite likely to fade quickly from the memory. It is for this reason that the witticisms, sayings, and scattered pieces of information, which we pick up here and there, are so soon forgotten. There is no way of bringing about their frequent reprodu

ng. Now if it is true that ideas are more easily remembered and used if associated, let us increase the associations. Why not bind all the studies and ideas of a child as closely together as possible by natural lines of association? Why not select for reading lessons those materials which will throw added light upon contemporaneous lessons in history, botany, and geography? Then if t

le on the other hand, one whose related thoughts have never been firmly welded together reproduces slowly, and in consequence is wavering and undecided. His knowledge is not at his command and he is therefore weak." (F. McMurry.) The greater then the number of clear mental relations of a fact to other facts in the same and in other studies the more likely it is to render instant obedience to the will when it is needed. Such read

inents. Around these islands we begin to collect the wreckage of the past and the accretions of later study and experience. A thoughtful person naturally falls into the habit of collecting ideas around a few centers, and of holding them in place by links of association. In American history, for instance, it is inevitable that our knowledge becomes congested in certain important epochs, or around the character and life of a few typical persons. The same seems to be true also of other studies, as geography and even geometry. The failure to acquire proper habits of thinking is

An observant boy in the woods will notice important relations between animals and plants, between plants, soil, and seasons that are not referred to in the text-books. In a carpenter shop he will observe relations of different kinds of wood, metals, and tools to each other that will surprise and instruct him. In the real life of the country or town the objects and materials of knowledge, representing the sciences of nature and the arts of life, are closely jumbled together and intimately dependent upon each other. The very closeness of causal and local connections and the lack of orderly arrangement shown by things in

s which were never mentioned together in textbooks. The ordinary run of cases will lead him through a kaleidoscope of natural science, human life, commerce, history, mathematics, literature, and law, not to speak of less agreea

er good sense must adapt all sorts of knowledge to real conditions. In bringing up her children she must understand physical and mental orders and disorders. She must judge of foods and cooking, of clothing, as to taste, comfort, and durability; of the exercises and employments of children, etc. Whether she is conscious of it or not, she must mingle a knowledge of chemistry, psychology, physiology, medicine, sanitation, the physics of light and air, w

e any "habit of thinking" more valuable than that bent of mind which is not satisfied with the mere memorizing of a fact but seeks to interpret its value by judging of its influence upon other facts and their influence upon it? No subject is understood by itself nor even by its relation to other facts in the same science, but by its relation to the whole field of knowledge and experience.

ural science, gymnastics, and manual training are entirely new, while language lessons, history, and music have been expanded to include much that is new for lower grades. Still other studies are even now seeking admission, as modern languages, geometry, and sewing. In spite of all that has been said by educational reformers against making the acquisition of knowledge the basis of education,

but it was deep and strong. In higher institutions the mastery of Latin and of Latin authors was the sine qua non. In the common school arithmetic was held in almost equal honor. Strong chara

ever, that this disease will grow worse before a remedy can be applied. The first attempt to cultivate broader and more varied fields of knowledge in the common school must necessarily exhibit a shallow result. Teachers are not familiar with the new subjects, methods are not developed, and the proper

ible. Well-qualified teachers and specialists will of course accomplish the most. They will zealously try to teach all the important things in each branch of study. But where is the limit? The capacity of children! And i

may fairly believe that most of the studies recently incorporated into the school course are essential elements in the education of every child that is to grow up and take a due share in our society. 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

n so adjusting the studies to each other, in so building them into each other, as to secure a mutual support. The study of a topic not only as it is affected by others in the same subject, but also by facts and principles in other studies, as an antidote against superfi

indeed shall be taught in the school, but only the essential, the typical, will be selected and an exhaustive knowledge of any subject is out of the question. Concentration will put a constant check upon over-accumulation of facts, and will rather seek to st

connection between the parts of knowledge. It was principally applied to the study of languages and called for perfect memorizing by incessant repetition and rigid questioning by the teacher to insure perfect understanding, in the first instance, of new facts acquired; and secondly, firm association with all previous knowledge. Jacotot and his disciples reached notable results by an heroic and consistent application of this principle and some of our present methods in language are based upon it. But

n Germany and to a considerable extent in our own

isions. The last two years of the common school may be spent upon a large, complete geography; which, with larger, fuller maps and more names, gives also a more detailed account of cities, products, climate, political divisions, and commerce. Finally, physical geography is permitted to spread over much the same ground from a natural-science standpoint, giving many additional and interesting facts and laws concerning zones, volcanoes, ocean-beds and currents, atmospheric phenomena, geologic history, etc. The same earth, the same lands and oceans, furnish the outline in each case, and we travel over the same ground three or four times successively, each time adding new facts to the original nuc

ews in arithmetic are designed to make good the lack of thoroughness and mastery which should characterize each successive grade of work. The course of religious instruction given in European schools is based upon the same reiteration year by year of essential religious ideas. The whole plan, as illustrated by different studies, is based upon a successive enlargement of a subject in concentric circles with the implied constant

vitably leads to a dull and mechanical repetition instead of cultivating an interesting comparison of new and old and a thoughtful retrospect. It is a clumsy and distorted application of the principle of apperception, of going from the known to the unknown. Instead of marching forward into new fields of knowledge with a proper basis of supplies in conquered fields, it gleans again and again in fields already harvested. For this reason it destroys a proper interest by hashin

Hist., p. 60) "Even with all other conditions favorable, it is doubtful if the American Union could have been preserved to the present time without the railroad. Railroads and telegraphs have made our vast country, both for political and for social purposes, more snug and compact than little Switzerland was in the middle ages or New England a century ago." The analogy between the realm of government and of knowledge is not at all complete but it suggests at least the change which is imperatively called for in education. In education as well as in commerce there must be t

aphy, history, and natural science. It is a fact that reading is becoming more and more a relative study, and selections are regularly made to bear on other school work. Geography especially serves to establish a network of connections between other kinds of knowledge. It is a very important supplement to history. In fact history cannot dispense with its help. Geography lessons are full of natural science, as with plants, animals, rocks, climate, inventions, machines, and races. Indeed there are few if any school studies which should not be brought i

, and natural science, we make a double or triple series of lessons necessary where a single series would answer the purpose. Moreover, by excluding an interesting subject-matter derived from other studies, the interest and mental life awakened by language lessons are reduced to a minimum. Interest is not only

reat problem of concentration. The links that now bind studies together in our work are largely accidental and no great stress has been laid upon their value, but if concentration is grappled with in earnest it involves relations at every step. Not only are the principal and tributary branches of knowledge brou

storical materials in the center of the school course. The ability of the school to affect moral character is not limited to the personal influence of the teacher and to the discipline and daily conduct of the children; but instruction itself, by illustrating and implanting moral ideas, and by closely relating all other kinds of knowl

LTURE

(moral educative) materials, which are to serve as the central series of the course. The culture epochs (cultur-historisch

s of progress in the race bear to the steps of change and growth in children, has become a matter of great interest in education. The assumption of the culture epochs is that the growth of moral and secular ideas in the race, represented at its best, is similar to their growth in children, and that children may find in the representative historical periods select materials for moral and intellectual nurture and a natural access to an understanding of our present condition of society. The culture epochs are those representative periods in history which are supposed to embody the elements of culture suited to train the young upon in their successive periods of growth. Goethe says, "Childhood must always begin again at the first and pass through the epochs of the world's culture." Herbart says, "The whole of the past survives in each of us," and again, "The receptivity (of the chil

hysical nature in and around them. Every child is an intimate blending of historical and physical (natural science) elements. The culture epochs illustrate a constant change and expansion of history and natural science together and in harmony (despite the conflict between them). As men have progressed historically and soc

e compelled to go back to the early settlements with their simple surroundings and slowly trace up the growth and increasing complexity of government, religion, commerce, manufactures, and social life. The theory of the culture epochs implies that the child began where primitive man began, feels as he felt, and advances as he advanced, only with more rapid strides; that as his physique is the hereditary outcome of thousands of years of history, and his

value of this theory is rather in its suggestiveness to teachers in their efforts to select suitable historical materials for children not in any exact order but approximately. So far as we are informed no one has yet tried to prove, in logical form, the necessary correspondence between the epochs of history and the periods of growth in children. It

then retrograded. Of those which have advanced with more or less steadiness for two thousand years, like England, France, and Germany, not every period of their history contains valuable culture elements. The great epochs are not clearly distinguishable in th

s, Joshua, David, and Solomon. The chief poets have expended a full measure of their art in presenting to posterity attractive events from striking epochs of the world's history. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Tennyson, and Longfellow have left for us such historical paintings as the Iliad, Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, Idyls of a King, Miles Standish, etc. Some of the best historians also have described such epochs of history in scarcely less attractive form. Xenophon's Anabasis, Livy's Punic Wars, Plutarch's Lives, Caesar's Galli

ed, and adapted for children, have been regarded by some thinkers as the strongest and best meat that can be supplied to children during their periods of growth. The history of each nation that has had a progressive civilization contains some such elements and masterpi

n 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. The first was scriptural, representing the chief epochs of Jewish and Christian history from the time of Abraham to the Reformation; the second was national German history from the early traditional stories of Thuringia a

llustrate for each grade corresponding epochs of national histor

ous. S

de. Fai

. Robinso

s, Stories of Thuringia

he Nibelungen Song, Samuel, Sa

st. Henry I., Charlemag

of Christ. Teu

Attila,

do

of Paul. Disco

ion, Thi

a

Frederick the Great, Wars a

Ziller's plan, modifi

ical narrative selected for any one grade is calculated to form a center or nucleus for concentrating all the studies of that year. Reading, language, geography, drawing, music, and arithmetic largely spring out of and depend upon this historical center, while they are also bound to each other

extending through many years, by able and thoroughly-equipped teachers, to solve one of the greatest problems of education, deserves careful attention. The general theory of concentration, the sel

rtant part of an American course of study. Religious instruction has been relegated to the church, and German history touches us indirectly if at all. The epochs of history from which American schools must draw are chiefly those of the U

nd intellectual qualities of children as they advance from year to year? There are few, if any, single nations whose history could furnish a favorable answer to this question. The English in America began their career so late in the world's history and wit

be fought for on the hardest terms. The fact that everything had to be built up anew from small beginnings on a virgin soil gave an opportunity to trace the rise of institutions from their infancy in a Puritan dwelling or in a town meeting till they spread and consolidated over a continent. In this short time the people have grown from little scattered settlements to a nation

lorers of the continent like Smith, Champlain, LaSalle, and Fremont. 2. The period of settlements, of colonial history, and of French and Indian wars. 3. The Revolution and life under the Articles of Confederation till the adoption of the Constitution. 4. Self-government under the Union and the growth and strengthening of the federal idea. While drawing largely upon general history for a

ho were daring leaders at the great period of maritime discovery. The pioneer explorers of New England and the other colonies bring out strongly marked characters in the preparatory stage of our earliest history. Smith, Champlain, Winthrop, Penn, Oglethorpe, Stuyvesant, and Washington are examples. In the Mississippi valley De Soto, La Salle, Boone, Lincoln, and Robertson, are types. Still farther west Lewis and Clarke, and the pioneers of Califo

have the stamp of heroism and in approving them the moral judgments of children are exercised upon noble material. These men and stories constitute an epoch in civilization because they represent that stage which just precedes the first form of settled society. In fact some of the stories fall in the transition stage, where men followed the plow and wielded the woodman's axe, or turned to the war-path as occasion required. In every part of the Unit

the teacher and orally reproduced by the pupils. Into what relations shall the other studies of the school enter to these historical materials? How s

view is the basis of much of the regular composition work. Language lessons on isolated and unconnected topics can thus be en

ms, Webster's and Everett's orations at Plymouth, Evangeline and Hiawatha, Indian legends and life, Miles Standish, The Knickerbocker History, and some of the original papers and letters of the early settlers. Whatever poems or prose selections from our best literature are found to bear directly or indirectly upon pioneer events, will add much interest and beauty to the whole subject. A second series of reading materials for these grades would be tho

action in both cases. These maritime explorers opened up the geography of this hemisphere at its most interesting stage. No part of the Atlantic ocean or of its North American coasts was overlooked by the navigators. The climate, vegetation and people upon its islands and coasts were curious objects to European adve

tlers. The mountains obstructed their way, presenting obstacles but not limits to their enterprise. The great forests housed their game, concealed their enemies, and had to be cut down to make space for their homes and cornfields. The prairies farther west were a camping ground for them as well as for the deer and buffalo. There are no impo

But we have already adjudged the history to be by far the more important of the two. Its subject-matter is of greater intrinsic interest to children

factorily in those studies; for example, the tobacco plant, the cactus, the deer, the hot springs, the squirrel, the mariner's compass. Natural science studies begin naturally with the home neighborhood, with its plants, trees, animals, rocks,

ar, fox, wildcat, deer, buffalo, domestic animals, wild turkeys, ducks, pigeons, eagle, hawk, wild bees, cat-fish, sword-fish, turtle, alligator, and many more. Among native products and fruits are mentioned corn, pumpkins, beans, huckleberries, grapes, strawberries, cranberries, tobacco, pawpaw, mulberry, haw, plum, apple, and persimmon. Of trees are oak, hickory, walnut, cypress, pine, birch, beech, and others. Tools, instruments, and inventions are mentioned, with their uses, as guns, Indian weapons, compass, thermometer, barometer, boats, carpenter's too

home objects in nature and by still others called up by the geography work of these years, would give sufficient variety to the natural science work of the same period. By omitting some of these topics and enlarging upon others, developing the notions of classes and principles so far as is desirable, the natural-

between these branches are numerous and strong at every step. Drawing has a very intimate and important relation to the objects described in history, natural science, arithmetic, and geography; while the

, we shall find some points where the relations are simple and clear. Children in the first grade should see numbers in the leaves, flowers, trees, and animals they study. At the beginning of the first grade th

n, with railroads, cities, and agricultural products, and with many other topics which suggest excellent practical problems in arithmetic for these grades. All such careful arithmetical computations add clearness and definiteness to historical and geographical ideas. The natural sci

ge, and arithmetic, may be brought into a close organic harmony. Each of them depends upon and throws light upon the other; and while the connections a

nd scientific arrangement of their materials, while keeping up the dependence upon and connections with the central subject. But if concentration is a true principle of education, it is evident that none of these problems can be solved until concentration h

ion upon children than the loose aggregation of facts which is usually collected during a year's work. Not only will the moral effect be

t the epochs closely related to each other in a rising series, from childhood almost to maturity, or from the beginning of history up to the present state of culture, we shall be

epochs is found in Lange's Apperception translated by t