Ștefan Velovan filosof și pedagog

Professor Ştefan Velovan (1852-1932) belongs to the first generation of Romanian pedagogues who established the study of pedagogy in normal schools. Educated at the European universities of Vienna and Gotha, he had a solid and very extensive culture, not only in philosophy, logic, psychology, but also in pedagogy. Ştefan Velovan was a formidable philosopher and logician. In philosophy he was against metaphysical, aprioristic, transcendental or metapsychic conceptions. He promoted a realist-empiricist philosophy stating that experience is identified, first of all, with the individual. The universal is not given by experience, because it repeats itself and, as such, is abstract, but is a construction of thought, a product of the activity of thought. In psychology, he developed a real treatise on pedagogical psychology entitled Mecanica psihologicica. Following Herbart's psychology step by step, Velovan reduces all psychic phenomena to ideas or representations. Professor Velovan was attracted to Herbart's pedagogy because it presented itself, at that time, as a "system" of truths based on a scientific foundation. He took over and deepened in a critical spirit the ideas of Herbartian pedagogy, applying them to the living conditions of our people. Ştefan Velovan managed to create a real school in Romania, which his disciples called the "Velovanist current". Adrian Michiduţă