Jerome Bruner Quotes

We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.

Learners are encouraged to discover facts and relationships for themselves.

Knowledge is justified belief.

Apollo without Dionysus may indeed be a well-informed, good citizen but he's a dull fellow. He may even be 'cultured,' in the sense one often gets from traditionalist writings in education ... But without Dionysus he will never make and remake a culture.

We carry with us habits of thought and taste fostered in some nearly forgotten classroom by a certain teacher.

We cannot, even given our most imaginative efforts, construct a concept of Self that does not impute some causal influence of prior mental states on later ones.

Education must, be not only a transmission of culture but also a provider of alternative views of the world and a strengthener of the will to explore them.

Rather, the master question from which the mission of education research is derived: What should be taught to whom, and with what pedagogical object in mind? That master question is threefold: what, to whom, and how? Education research, under such a dispensation, becomes an adjunct of educational planning and design. It becomes design research in the sense that it explores possible ways in which educational objectives can be formulated and carried out in the light of cultural objectives and values in the broad.

Contrary to common sense there is no unique "real world" that pre-exists and is independent of human mental activity and human symbolic language; that which we call the world is a product of some mind whose symbolic procedures construct the world.

In the perception of the incongruous stimuli, the recognition process is temporarily thwarted and exhibits characteristics which are generally not observable in the recognition of more conventional stimuli.

Good teaching is forever being on the cutting edge of a child's competence.

The young child approaching a new subject or anew problem is like the scientist operating at the edge of his chosen field.

We need to conceive of ourselves as "agents" impelled by self-generated intentions.

There is, perhaps, one universal truth about all forms of human cognition: the ability to deal with knowledge is hugely exceeded by the potential knowledge contained in man's environment. To cope with this diversity, man's perception, his memory, and his thought processes early become governed by strategies for protecting his limited capacities from the confusion of overloading. We tend to perceive things schematically, for example, rather than in detail, or we represent a class of diverse things by some sort of averaged typical instance.

Telling others about oneself is ... no simple matter. It depends on what we think they think we ought to be like

Teaching is the canny art of intellectual temptation

Surely knowledge of the natural world, knowledge of the human condition, knowledge of the nature and dynamics of society, knowledge of the past so that one may use it in experiencing the present and aspiring to the future
all of these, it would seem reasonable to suppose, are essential to an educated man. To these must be added another
knowledge of the products of our artistic heritage that mark the history of our esthetic wonder and delight.

The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.

Being able to "go beyond the information" given to "figure things out" is one of the few untarnishable joys of life. One of the great triumphs of learning (and of teaching) is to get things organised in your head in a way that permits you to know more than you "ought" to. And this takes reflection, brooding about what it is that you know. The enemy of reflection is the breakneck pace - the thousand pictures.

The essence of creativity is figuring out how to use what you already know in order to go beyond what you already think.

The fish will be the last to discover water.

Organizing facts in terms of principles and ideas from which they may be inferred is the only known way of reducing the quick rate of loss of human memory.

Grasping the structure of a subject is understanding it in a way that permits many other things to be related to it meaningfully. To learn structure in short, is to learn how things are related.

There is a deep question whether the possible meanings that emerge from an effort to explain the experience of art may not mask the real meanings of a work of art.

Understanding something in one way does not preclude understanding it in other ways.