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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    clever and very careless. Suddenly the mathematical master reported an amazing improvement in John's marks. On investigation the improvement was found to limit itself to mensuration. Still further inquiry narrowed down the prodigy to areas of segments of circles; but as those could not be understood without previous work, John asked and obtained permission to work from the beginning. In three weeks he had bored his way honestly through half of Todhunter's Mensuration^ and was very eager to be promoted to the volumes of spheres. John was now the talk of the masters' room, where nobody had a good word to say for him except the science master, who reported that John had developed a violent interest in Chemistry, and was showing leanings towards volumetric analysis. The whole trouble was afterwards traced to its primary bacillus in a gigantic balloon that John was projecting. How to cut the gores drove him to Todhunter ; how to calculate how much zinc and sulphuric acid were neces- sary to float his balloon with hydrogen had urged him to Chemistry. Balloon-making did not make either mensuration or Chemistry easy; it made them inter- esting. A feeble objection to the use of interest as an essen- tial part of all education is that it leaves no room for training the sense of duty. Under this lurks the humiliating assumption that duty is necessarily unin- teresting. This fallacy, that duty is in its very nature uninteresting and unpleasant, is deeply rooted in many minds, and requires very vigorous efforts to dislodge it. Most men find that all their acts fall easily and