Jerome Bruner Quotations

One seeks to equip the child with deeper, more gripping, and subtler ways of knowing the world and himself.

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.

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.

Learners are encouraged to discover facts and relationships for themselves.

Stimuli, however, do not act upon an indifferent organism.

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.

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.

I would urge that the yeast of education is the idea of excellence, and the idea of excellence comprises as many forms as there are individuals, each of whom develops his own image of excellence. The school must have as one of its principal functions the nurturing of images of excellence.

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.

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.

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

We are only now on the threshold of knowing the range of the educability of man-the perfectibility of man. We have never addressed ourselves to this problem before.

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.

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

The notion of multiple literacies recognized that there are many ways of being-and of becoming-literate, and that how literacy develops and how it is used depend on the particular social and cultural setting.

Agency presupposes choice.

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

Passion, like discriminating taste, grows on its use. You more likely act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action.

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.

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.

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.

Whoever reflects recognizes that there are empty and lonely spaces between one’s experiences.

It is sentimentalism to assume that the teaching of life can always be fitted to the child's interests, just as it is empty formalism to force the child to parrot the formulas of adult society. Interests can be created and stimulated.

Knowledge helps only when it descends into habits.

In time, and as one comes to benefit from experience, one learns that things will turn out neither as well as one hoped nor as badly as one feared.

The main characteristic of play - whether of child or adult - is not it content but its mode. Play is an approach to action, not a form of activity.

Knowledge is justified belief.

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

Teaching is the canny art of intellectual temptation

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

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.

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.

The agentive mind is not only active in nature, but it seeks out dialogue and discourse with other active minds. And it is through this dialogic, discursive process that we come to know the Other and his points of view, his stories. We learn an enormous amount not only about the world but about ourselves by discourse with Others.

The fish will be the last to discover water.

In reference to right answers - Knowing is a process, not a product.

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

The foundations of any subject may be taught to anybody at any age in some form.

Being able to "go beyond the information" given to "figure things out" is one of the few untarnishable joys of life.

We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.

"Thinking about thinking" has to be a principle ingredient of any empowering practice of education.

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