Herbart paid special attention to the role and significance of intellectual education in education and put forward the famous theory of "education and teaching". He regards the realization of educational goals and the teaching of cultural knowledge as the same process, and thinks that any teaching must be educational, and there is neither "teaching without teaching" nor "teaching without teaching", so all the work of the school should be attributed to "education and teaching".
He believes that in the teaching process, "various interests" are the "internal motivation" of students' conscious activities. In other words, if students have various interests, they will actively pursue knowledge and devote themselves to learning to achieve the purpose of teaching. He divided his interests into six categories: empirical, speculative, aesthetic, sympathetic, social and religious. According to these interests, Herbart drew up a complex curriculum system for ordinary middle schools.
Teaching comprehension
Teaching is educating people, and the unity of teaching and educating people is an important law. Herbart, a German educator, once pointed out clearly: "I don't recognize any teaching without education." In other words, any teaching activity contains the factors of ideological and moral education. In the teaching process, the process of teachers guiding students to master knowledge is the process of transforming the achievements of human cognition into students' individual cognition.
In this organized cognitive process, the main problem to be solved is how to effectively transform the basic knowledge accumulated by human beings into the knowledge of a new generation of individuals. Teaching process is an important link and link between the overall knowledge of human beings and the individual knowledge of students, which determines that it must be simple.