Herbartian apperception

The Humane Psychology of Education echoes some of Charlotte Mason's themes, especially those in her book Philosophy of Education which I have been rereading.

"We hold that the child's mind is no mere sac to hold ideas but is rather, if the figure may be allowed, a 'spiritual organism' with an appetite for all knowledge. This is its proper diet with which it is prepared to deal and what it is able to digest and assimilate as the body does food-stuffs."

"Such a doctrine as the Herbartian, that the mind is a receptacle, lays the stress of education, the preparation of food in enticing morsels, duly ordered, upon the teacher. Children taught on this principle are in danger of receiving much teaching but little knowledge; the teacher's axiom being 'what a child learns matters less than how he learns it.'"

She then quotes John Adams, with reference to his "dry Scottish humor":

"We have failed to explain ideas by the mind, how about explaining the mind by ideas? You are not to suppose that this is exactly how Herbart puts it, Herbart is a philosopher, a German philosopher. It is true that he starts with the mind or, as he prefers to call it, a soul: but do not fear that the sport of the hunt is to be spoiled for that . . . the 'given' soul is no more a real soul than it is a real crater of a volcano. It has absolutely no content: it is not even an idea trap. Ideas can slip in and out of it as they please, or, rather, as other ideas please but the soul has no power either to call, make, keep, or recall, an idea. The ideas arrange all these matters among themselves. The mind can make no objection."

"'The soul has no capacity nor faculty whatever either to receive or produce anything: it is therefore no tabula rasa in the sense that impressions, foreign to its nature, may be made on it. Also it is no substance in Leibnitz's sense, which includes original self-activity. It has originally neither ideas, nor feelings, nor desires. Further, within it lie no forms of intuition and thought, no laws of willing and acting, nor any sort of predisposition however remote towards these. The simple nature of the soul is totally unknown and for ever remains so. It is as little a subject for speculative as for empirical psychology.' (Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, by Herbart: Part III: pp.152, 153.) Thus, a vigorous vis inertiae is the only power of the mind. Still it is subject to the action of certain forces. Nothing but ideas (Vorstellung) can attack the soul so that the ideas really make up the mind."

Now look at what Dr Castiello writes (he was a professor at Bonn so I have no doubt he was confronted by many of the Herbartian ideas in that milieu)

A psychology of education which does away with reason and is concerned exclusively with man's animal functions, or with the interpretation of his human functions in terms of the mechanical S-R theory, cannot humanise. It will necessarily destroy all personality. It will glorify instinct and mechanize all learning, reducing it to its lowest form, "association" or "bond-making". It will neglect the acquisition of aesthetic ideals and will take no notice whatever of human freedom, and of the moral issues which are essentially bound up with responsibility. ....