Education, history of philosophy of

8. The nineteenth century

The nineteenth century was a period of unprecedented innovation in the theory of learning and the theory and practice of pedagogy, particularly in Germany. From a philosophical standpoint this activity can be described most simply as a playing-out of Enlightenment ideas and of the romantic and aesthetic reactions to them initiated by Rousseau and Friedrich von Schiller. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) and Friedrich Wilhelm Froebel (1782–1852) were the most prominent of those strongly influenced by Rousseau, the former being known for a pedagogy grounded in the analysis of tasks into simple components, his advocacy of universal educational rights and efforts to educate the poor ‘organically’ in a family-like setting; the latter for founding the kindergarten as a place of growth in unity with God and nature. Johann Friedrich Herbart is noteworthy for his attempts to develop the experimental science of pedagogy envisaged by Kant, and for a theory of ideas and learning which held that it is ‘apperceptive masses’ formed by past experience that structure new experiences, allowing the assimilation of ideas that are compatible but driving from consciousness those that are not.

Though not a philosopher of education himself, Karl Marx has figured importantly in the subsequent history of the field through, among other things, his theory of ideology, an exceedingly influential if unsystematic account of the way in which socioeconomic roles and the ideas that structure them are learned through contact with a society and its institutions. Contraposed to the radical egalitarianism of Marx was the radical elitism of Friedrich Nietzsche, the other great immoralist of the nineteenth century, who condemned the democratization of the universities on the grounds that the reversal of cultural decadence and advancement of human wellbeing through the free play of creativity requires that higher education remain the exclusive province of ‘higher types’.