American psychologist (1915-2016)
The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.
JEROME BRUNER
"The Psychology of Learning", Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1968
We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.
JEROME BRUNER
Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life
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."
JEROME S. BRUNER
Art as a Mode of Knowing
Discovery is the ability to see what everybody else has seen and to think what nobody else has thought.
JEROME BRUNER
"The Act of Discovery", Harvard Educational Review, 1961
The central concept of a human psychology is meaning and the processes and transactions involved in the construction of meanings. To understand man you must understand how his experiences and his acts are shaped by his intentional states; the form of these intentional states is realized only through participation in the symbolic systems of the culture. Indeed, the very shape of our lives -- the rough and perpetually changing draft of our autobiography that we carry in our minds -- is understandable to ourselves and to others only by virtue of those cultural systems of interpretation.
JEROME BRUNER
Acts of Meaning
The best way to understand something is to try to change it.
JEROME BRUNER
New York Times, June 7, 2016
Passion, like discriminating taste, grows on its use. You more likely act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action.
JEROME BRUNER
On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand
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.
JEROME S. BRUNER
The Culture of Education
The purpose of education is to produce autonomous learners who can continue to learn after they leave school.
JEROME BRUNER
"The Relevance of Education", Journal of Curriculum Studies, 2002
Culture and education are two sides of the same coin, and we cannot understand one without understanding the other.
JEROME BRUNER
"Culture and Education", Harvard Educational Review, 1983
Character and the company of identities that constitute it seem to emerge at times of crisis in the life of man.
JEROME BRUNER
On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand
We are capable of generating an almost infinite number of narratives about the same event, and it is the interpretation of the event that matters, not just the event itself.
JEROME BRUNER
"The Narrative Construction of Reality", Critical Inquiry, 1991
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.
JEROME BRUNER
Actual Minds, Possible Worlds
Education is not just about learning facts, but about learning how to learn.
JEROME BRUNER
New York Times, June 7, 2016
We are not just information processors, we are meaning makers.
JEROME BRUNER
"The Mind's Eye in Art and Science", Leonardo, 1988
You went to somewhere to do something with an anticipated goal in mind, something you couldn't do elsewhere and be the same Self.
JEROME BRUNER
Acts of Meaning
After a while the introvert develops strong extraversive needs; the man whose life has been governed exclusively by thinking craves in time the guide of feeling; the literal man searches eventually for ways of intuiting. So with the principal actors within the human character. Their rebellious understudies, if I may so designate them, are often of opposite persuasion.
JEROME BRUNER
On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand