赫尔巴特（Johann Friedrich Herbart 1776～1841）德国哲学家、教育家和心理学家。1776年5月4日生 于德国的奥尔登堡。1794年18岁时入耶拿大学，毕业后曾在瑞主任家庭教师，同J. H.裴斯塔洛齐相识，因而对 教育发生了兴趣。1802～1809年又到格丁根大学学了7年，取得博士学位。后任该校讲师。1809年到柯尼斯堡大学继任康德的哲学讲座，历24年之久。1833年他回到格丁很大学任哲学教授，直到1841年8月14日去世时为止。 　　

    赫尔巴特著作很多，有关心理学的主要著作有：《心理学教科书》（1816）、《作为科学的心理学》（18 24～1825）等书。 　　

    他的心理学思想直接受 G. W.莱布尼兹和康德思想的影响，但有所发展。他第一次宣称心理学是一门科学，认为它是建立在经验之上的，所以心理学应该是经验的科学。他还认为心理学应是数学的科学，要用数学的方法对心理量进行计算，因此他在心理学中第一次作了运用数学法的尝试。　　

    赫尔巴特接受了莱布尼兹关于灵魂中了具有活动特性的观点，认为观念也是活动的；同时他也吸取了英国 联想主义的思想和当时力学关于引力和斥力的概念来说明观念互相吸引和互相排斥的关系。他为了进一步揭示 观念书相互作用的规律，还提出了“意识阈”（conscious threshold）和“统觉团”（appercertiue mass） 的概念。他以为一个观念若要由一个完全被抑制的状态进入一个现实观念的状态，便须跨过一道界线，这些界 线便为“意识阈”。而任何观念要进入意识内，都必须与意识中原有观念的整体相和谐，否则就会被排斥。这 个观念的整体叫做“统觉团”。他的“统觉团”理论在教育上的应用，使他成为近代的教育理论家。　　赫尔巴特的心理学思想属于唯心主义体系，但其中也含有辩证法的因素。他明确主张心理学是科学，教育 学应建立在心理学理论之上的第一个教育理论家。他关于心理学的一系列的思想对费希纳的心理物理学、弗洛 伊德的精神分析学说以及各国教育理论都有直接的影响。

        Herbart was above all a trained and discipiined thinker who passed most of the days and nights of his mature life in the herimitage of the academic community. In his dealings with education he had neither Pestalozzi's tenderness for his fellow creatures nor Rousseau's swoop of intuitive vision. In their place, however, he brought to his work the confidence which issues from the possession of an enormous fund of knowledge and the intellectual acuity to put it to effective use.
　　True to the universal watchword of pedagogic masters through the ages, Herbart relied heartily on the assumption that education's primary purpose is to make men good and thereby happy. But the principles which bottomed right and wrong, he was fond of telling us, were determined by the society they are designed to keep in peace and happiness. By this token it becomes education's primary mission to instill in the young the values held dear② by the custodians of the established social order, to believe, in short, in all things that law-abiding citizens of Christendom believe in, from truth and justice to service, duty, good works, and a healthy body and mind. Not knowledge, but character and social morality, should be the end of education. "The term virtue," Herbart observed, "expresses the whole purpose of education."
　　With Pestalozzi's notion that good teaching and learning could proceed only when they rested on a psychological foundation, Herhart was in hearty accord. But Pestalozzi's blithe acceptance of the existence of mental faculties, each one an entity performing its function apart from the others③, Herbart could not take. More perceptive than his prexleceseor, Herbart undertook to rid psychology of its rickety assumption④. For a quarter of a century or so, he reminded us in his autumnal years, he used metaphysics and mathematics and with them self-observation, experience, and experiment, "to find the foundations of true psychological insight." As a result, he conceived a psychology which, in at least one respect, is closer to our own, namely in its view that, save under unusual circumstances, mental behavior is a fairly integrated, process.
　　Pestainzzi, following in the track of Rousseau, Comenins, and a few other visionaries in education, committed himself to the doctrine of guiding the pupil to what he does not know by tying the material to be learned, insofar as common sense permits, to what he does know or of going from the known to the unknown. This principle Herbart pronouneed fundamentally correct⑤. He not only amended and broadened the doctrine's scope, he also daubed it with psychological tints.Designated"apperception,"the theory-stripped to its hare skin-asserts that any new idea or experience is interpreted by means of those already known.
　　Nothing like Herbart's FormalSteps ⑥ had ever been dreamed of before, and so their very novelty brought them to notice.Entering upon the pedagogic scene when Pestalozzi's object lesson was beginning to gray around the edges, the Herbartian steps presently replaced their predecessor not only in Europe but in America as well. They attained their highest vogue during the century's final quarter, when it became their lot to fall to the challenges of a newer, more vital and valid psychology.
　　Besides the theories aforementioned, Herbart cortcected several others. He was, indeed, one of the most fecund generators of pedagogic theorems⑦ in the teaching world. He was the first to arrive at the view that subjects should not be treated as so many isalated entities hut, whenever possible, should be judiciously brought together. The mathematical studies, for example, "from elementary arithmetic to higher mathematics," Herbart asserted, "are to be linked to the pupil's knowledge of nature, and so to his experience...." So taught, mathematical ideas would flow into the student's general stream of thought and thereby be of some personal worth. Contrariwise, "when the ideas generated form an isolated group...they are usually soon forgotten." This interweaving of subject matter the professor called "correlation," a name which is still used, though in its current form it is executed on a far vaster and more sophisticated scale.
　　Like Plato and Aristotle, Herbart devoted most of his years to philosophic reflection. Like the one, he was also a celebrity in mathematics, and like the other, he was a partisan of the natural sciences. Pedagogue though he was⑧,whose overrlding concern lay in the realm of educational theory, it was Herbart, nevertheless, who conceived the hope of studying education as a science. To him must go the credit for winning a reputable place for it in the groves of the higher learning ⑨, where he strove laboriously to transform his hope into a fact.
　　What went for education as a whole also went for its omnipresent handmaid, psychology. At a time when the study of the human psyche was largely a matter of guesswork, especially of those master guessers, the metaphysicians and divine scientists, Herbart tried to inject a measure of exactness into the subject by putting it on a mathematical basis. 　　Though this turned out to be too baffling for even his prodigious mind, yet in the long run it proved to be a vision of things to come.
　　Finally, it was Herbart who, in his quest for a sound educational theory as scientific as time and circumstance would let him make it, instituted a model school which served him and his associates as a laboratory in which they could put their doetrines to the trial of classroom practice, and in which they could direct and observe the progress of their panting student teachers.
　　--from GRANDMASTERS OF EDUCA-TIONAL THOUGHT by Adolphe E.Meyer, 1975