Educational instruction and multiple interest in Herbart: approaches with the formation of the ethical subject in Foucault

Abstract

This article takes up Johann Friedrich Herbart’s notions of educational instruction and multiplicity of interest, in an effort to re-read their pedagogical potential through their articulation with the hermeneutic character of the human condition. Such character leads to the understanding that there is an ethical and formative dimension present in school knowledges/learnings and that they make it possible the constitution of an ethical way of existing. From Herbart, through hermeneutic reflection, the article establishes approaches with Michel Foucault, recovering, from his work, the formative sense of self-care and the knowledge of spirituality linked to it. Thus, it is understood that the knowledge / truth can bring the subject a transformation of himself insofar as it is constituted for him as spiritual modalization. Therefore, there is something very close to Herbart's spiritual notion of interest and to the goal of his educational instruction, which is to forge a spiritual disposition in the subject, a multiple interest in the world and human relations. Formation to the multiplicity of interest enlarges the subject's symbolic universe, allowing him/her to understand him/herself, the other and the world in a broad way, which is fundamental to an ethical life.