What is the contribution of carl ritter in geography?
Answers
Carl Ritter exercised a much more direct influence on the development and growth of geography in Germany than did Humboldt. Ritter was born in Quedlinburg in 1779. His father was a physician and when he died his widow lacked any means of support for her family of five.
In spite of acute financial trouble, Carl was fortunate enough to have the guidance of a geographer named J. C. F. Guts Muths whose major interests were in nature study and in geography and who had earned a name for his contributions to the development of geography.
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Carl Ritter received his early training in a school in Schnepfenthal near Gotha, where the teaching was based on the principles of Rousseau and Pestalozzi. Rousseau in his novel Emile (1762) devised a new educational procedure which contradicted the traditional method, as the purpose of the new procedure was to encourage a child to develop inborn potentialities.
The Swiss scholar and educator, Johann Pestalozzi, further developed the ideas and pointed out that concepts must be based on the observation of phenomena and the young children must be exposed to nature so that they could observe the close involvement of man with his immediate surroundings.
Salzamann was enthusiastic about these new suggestions and founded his school at Schnepfenthal in the Thuringerwald to experiment with them. Space relations were basically emphasised. Students were taught to observe the relationships of things in their immediate vicinity.
At an early age, Ritter was able to observe the close relationship between humankind and his environment. From the richly varied landscapes of the region of hills and low mountains, to which Ritter was exposed by his teacher, he derived the idea of unity of nature which became a basic theme of his geographical scholarship.
At the age of seventeen he entered the University of Helle, where he worked with Professor Niemeyer. He learnt Latin and Greek and read widely in geography and history. It was here at Frankfurt-on-the Oder that Carl picked up the habit of frequent field trips around the city.
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He greatly increased his competence as an observer that helped him to develop his own methods. He went to Switzerland and Italy, etc. making careful and detailed observation. Ritter came into close contact with many eminent scholars of the day, of whom the most significant were the anatomist Sommering, the geologist Ebel, and the leader of educational reform Pestalozzi.
Ritter’s preparation for research covered an extremely wide field, in which on the one hand natural sciences (particularly the observational methods of nature study) predominated, but in which, on the other hand, his interest was increasingly human problem, i.e. history.
Geography maintained the connection between his earlier field of studies and his ultimate interests. Ritter’s meeting with Von Humboldt in 1807 was significant in many ways because Humboldt clearly demonstrated to him the importance of Earth conditions to humankind which had a profound impact on the scholarship of Ritter