Differences between traditional and substantive educational theories

Formal education, time: 17th century, representative figures: British educator Locke and Swiss educator Pestalozzi. Theoretical basis: formal education is based on functional psychology. This theory believes that the various abilities of the human psyche, such as feeling, thinking, memory and so on, are separate entities, and that these faculties can be trained separately, and after improving their abilities, they can be transferred to any other objects.

Substantive education, time: the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, the representative: the German educator Herbart and the British educator Spencer is its main representative. Theoretical basis: Substantive education is based on the psychology of associationism.

The claims of both formal and substantive education are one-sided, and they have artificially separated the mastery of knowledge and the development of intellect. Although the formal educators emphasized the need to train students' intellects, they failed to see that the development of intellect relies on the mastery of knowledge, and the effect of leaving the mastery of the basic knowledge of the subject to the training of the form of thinking is not good.