A Study On The Herbart's Interest Education Thoughts

Herbert is a master in the history of modern western education. His educational thoughts are rich, broad and deep. The thesis aims at digging and reconstructing interest education thoughts which has always existed in the Herbart's education theory, but not been fully identified and understood. This effort can reveal the close links between interest and education, teaching from multi-perspectives, and provide a beneficial approach to enrich the understanding of Herbart's education theory.This paper is focused on Herbart's interest education thoughts, discussing it thoroughly from following four facets.The first part, starting from the introduction of the social background and theoretical basis, mainly analyzes the social needs of freedom and ration, the rapid growing of consciousness of science and technology, and the promotion of renaissance to interest education thoughts.The second part extends Herbart's theory into following three facets:the interrelation between interest and aims of education, between interest and courses, and between interest and teaching. There comes out a final recognition from discussing the fundamental conception of interest, its categories and training methods. And there presents a more profound comprehension of Herbart's conception of aim of education, courses and teaching basing on interest. In the third part, I have used the method of comparison, comparing wholly between Herbart's interest education thoughts and representative of modern education-Dewey's interest education thoughts, discussing their commonalities and divergences, and analyzing the reasons of divergences. Therefore, we can obtain the characteristics and defects of Herbart's theory from multidimensional to further the recognition of his theory.The fourth part mainly discusses the historical status and the meaning to the modern world of Herbart's interest education thoughts. Through the comprehensive introduction of his theory, with the specific social background, we come to recognition that Herbart was the first one who had disserted systematically the relating conception of interest, created the theory of "multi-interest" on teaching aims, constructed for the first time a whole course system, and led the development of the theory on teaching methods. His theory has a great significance on the construction of our teaching activities basing on two main parts of teacher and student, and the cultivation of creative persons.