Its view of children as active problem-solvers who are ready to explore ‘difficult’ subjects while being out of step with the dominant view in education at that time, struck a chord with many. ‘It was a surprise’, Jerome Bruner was later to write (in the preface to the 1977 edition), that a book expressing so structuralist a view of knowledge and so intuitionist an approach to the process of knowing should attract so much attention in America, where empiricism had long been the dominant voice and ‘learning theory’ its amplifier’ (ibid.: vii).

Four key themes emerge out of the work around The Process of Education (1960: 11-16):

The role of structure in learning and how it may be made central in teaching. The approach taken should be a practical one. ‘The teaching and learning of structure, rather than simply the mastery of facts and techniques, is at the center of the classic problem of transfer… If earlier learning is to render later learning easier, it must do so by providing a general picture in terms of which the relations between things encountered earlier and later are made as clear as possible’ (ibid.: 12).

Readiness for learning. Here the argument is that schools have wasted a great deal of people’s time by postponing the teaching of important areas because they are deemed ‘too difficult’.

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. (ibid.: 33)

This notion underpins the idea of the spiral curriculum – ‘A curriculum as it develops should revisit this basic ideas repeatedly, building upon them until the student has grasped the full formal apparatus that goes with them’ (ibid.: 13).

Intuitive and analytical thinking. Intuition (‘the intellectual technique of arriving and plausible but tentative formulations without going through the analytical steps by which such formulations would be found to be valid or invalid conclusions’ ibid.: 13) is a much neglected but essential feature of productive thinking. Here Bruner notes how experts in different fields appear ‘to leap intuitively into a decision or to a solution to a problem’ (ibid.: 62) – a phenomenon that Donald Schön was to explore some years later – and looked to how teachers and schools might create the conditions for intuition to flourish.

Motives for learning. ‘Ideally’, Jerome Bruner writes, interest in the material to be learned is the best stimulus to learning, rather than such external goals as grades or later competitive advantage’ (ibid.: 14). In an age of increasing spectatorship, ‘motives for learning must be kept from going passive… they must be based as much as possible upon the arousal of interest in what there is be learned, and they must be kept broad and diverse in expression’ (ibid.: 80).

Bruner was to write two ‘postscripts’ to The Process of Education: Towards a theory of instruction (1966) and The Relevance of Education (1971). In these books Bruner ‘put forth his evolving ideas about the ways in which instruction actually affects the mental models of the world that students construct, elaborate on and transform’ (Gardner 2001: 93). In the first book the various essays deal with matters such as patterns of growth, the will to learn, and on making and judging (including some helpful material around evaluation). Two essays are of particular interest – his reflections on MACOS (see above), and his ‘notes on a theory of instruction’. The latter essay makes the case for taking into account questions of predisposition, structure, sequence, and reinforcement in preparing curricula and programmes. He makes the case for education as a knowledge-getting process:

To instruct someone… is not a matter of getting him to commit results to mind. Rather, it is to teach him to participate in the process that makes possible the establishment of knowledge. We teach a subject not to produce little living libraries on that subject, but rather to get a student to think mathematically for himself, to consider matters as an historian does, to take part in the process of knowledge-getting. Knowing is a process not a product. (1966: 72)

The essays in The Relevance of Education (1971) apply his theories to infant development.

The culture of education

Jerome Bruner’s reflections on education in The Culture of Education (1996) show the impact of the changes in his thinking since the 1960s. He now placed his work within a thorough appreciation of culture: ‘culture shapes the mind… it provides us with the toolkit by which we construct not only our worlds but our very conception of our selves and our powers’ (ibid.: x). This orientation ‘presupposes that human mental activity is neither solo nor conducted unassisted, even when it goes on “inside the head” (ibid.: xi). It also takes Bruner well beyond the confines of schooling.

Mark K. Smith