The Herbartian psychology applied to education : being a series of essays applying the psychology of Johann Friedrich Herbart / by John Adams.

  • Adams, John, 1857-1934.
Date:
[1900?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The Herbartian psychology applied to education : being a series of essays applying the psychology of Johann Friedrich Herbart / by John Adams. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    gives is an indication of what goes on in his mind. The fundamental mistake we are apt to make is to neglect this aspect of the matter, and to act as if each answer had only an absolute value in itself, in relation to an absolute outside fact. The question of questions for a teacher must be How does this strike my pupil ? In his recently published Studies of Childhood^ Pro- fessor Sully 1 lays stress on the folly of parents who take young children to see landscapes from favourable points of view. He shows that the child cannot see the view as a whole ; he has not that sense of freedom that dis- tance and wide expanse always bring to an adult. The child merely picks out some prominent feature, usually close at hand, and almost invariably of no inter- est to grown-up folks, and pins all his attention on that. The whole progress in knowledge is from a vague un- seen to a clearly seen whole. The educator who seeks to cultivate observation by supplying materials to gape at, does not know the rudiments of his art. True observation is the offspring of interest and knowledge. We observe easily what we are interested in or what we already know something about, so the teacher in seeking to train observation must give up attending to the keenness of an eagle's sight and the delicacy of a dog's sense of smell, and turn to consider interest and knowledge. A professor who is a passenger on a sailing vessel has been admiring the keenness of observation of the sailor on the lookout. But when he and the sailor are reading the most recent available newspapers in the 1 Op. cit., p. 306.