Johann Friedrich Herbart

Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776 to 1841) was a German philosopher and psychologist, born in Oldenburg, who is remembered as the founder of pedagogy as an academic discipline. He studied at Jena, where he came to disagree with his teacher Fichte, worked for some years as a private tutor in Switzerland, where he met the educator Pestalozzi, and later lectured at Göttingen before taking up the chair once held by Kant at Königsberg. There he ran a seminar in pedagogy until 1833, then returned to Göttingen as professor of philosophy until his death. In psychology he treated the mind as a system of ideas that struggle with and inhibit one another, and he held that mental processes could be described with the exactness of mathematical laws; ideas pushed out of consciousness fall below a threshold from which they strive to return. His educational thought, known as Herbartianism, aimed at the all-round development of the personality and shaped teaching practice well beyond Germany.