Reading Herbart's General Pedagogy is a long and profound adventure. Some people say that reading is a kind of torture and suffering, and it is true. Especially when reading those obscure works, the tearing of body and mind can bring you back to reality several times, but it is pushed back by your will and spirit. Only in this way can you really appreciate the hardships of reading and learning. Even so, metaphysical time is better than sensuality.

My main concern in this book is his exposition on morality. His famous four-stage teaching method, that is, clarity, unity, system and method (the original translation is like this), is actually very easy to understand.

Only by calming down and concentrating can we see things clearly and recognize our goals; After students determine their goals and knowledge, they will inevitably extend from this focused activity to another focused activity. This switching is also a psychological activity. From a broader perspective, it is actually the combination of knowledge and knowledge (or in the broadest translation, it should be called the relationship between knowledge and knowledge).

From the previous concentration and deliberation, students not only have a clear understanding of knowledge and things, but also connect knowledge in a contact way. In the process of linking, there must be the first one, then the second one, and then the second one, which is called the system; With the system, it will naturally form a cognitive method about this system.

In addition to this famous four-stage teaching method, Herbart also proposed a four-stage "activation" method, which is similar to the four-stage teaching method. This activation method is used to seize interest and use interest, that is, attention, expectation, request and action. These are also easy to understand, so I won't go into details.

Before we begin to discuss moral theory, we must compare Herbart with the educators before and after him. Herbart has always been the object of criticism by later educators, because Herbart attaches great importance to discipline, which is reflected in what he calls discipline in teaching. Discipline is actually a kind of moral education, which is divided into contingency and continuity. Discipline is an educational behavior that directly affects children's psychology.

This is different from Rousseau and Locke before him. Naturalist educators always emphasize students' self-development, but Herbart believes that this development model will lead to irreparable mistakes, that is, it will form an irreversible objective character. Herbart believes that there are two kinds of personality, namely, the objective part (similar to nature) and the subjective part (newly formed).

The cultivation and education of personality should focus on the subjective part, and use the education of these subjective parts to influence the objective part that is difficult to adjust directly, so as to correct personality. It can be found that Herbart emphasizes correction and standards, which determines that Herbart's education law is very suitable for schools and large-scale education.

Compared with later educators, Herbart's education is relatively fixed, because he used religion and classics, while Montessori used environment and work, and Dewey used society and experience. The teaching materials and methods used in both are based on the essence of human life and existence, and they are personalized education on a fixed basis, or we can say that they are all constructivist education.

Therefore, in the field of morality, Herbart's moral education is relatively fixed, and it is a kind of morality that combines social ethics and religious rules. More standardized and orthodox than Rousseau and Locke, more rigid than Montessori and Dewey. But because of this, Herbart is a very important educator, that is, "connecting the preceding with the following".

However, this does not mean that Herbart's moral education is not unique. Herbart's moral education creatively simulates some possible mistakes in moral education. For example, if a student pays too much attention to the results, it may lead him to become snobbish and lose the unconditional goodwill in human nature. Or giving too much material feedback in the early stage will easily make the student lack concentration and the ability to dig deep into knowledge in the future, that is, indulge in superficial enjoyment.

Or if a student shows his research ability and concentration prematurely, it is a sign of lack of creativity and precocity, and such a student may have mental problems in the future. Herbart's description of these special cases is exquisite, which also gives him a strict moral education with a touch of tenderness and human touch.

In addition, Herbart, like Rousseau, Montessori and Dewey, attaches importance to the two-way function of the environment, that is, using discipline to realize the use of habits and qualities, using environment and moral education to get rid of bad tendencies, and encouraging reasonable tendencies, which is also its merits.