The Process of Education

Jerome Bruner

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1976
• ISBN:
  9780674253117
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this classic argument for curriculum reform in early education, Jerome Bruner shows that the basic concepts of science and the humanities can be grasped intuitively at a very early age. He argues persuasively that curricula should he designed to foster such early intuitions and then build on them in increasingly formal and abstract ways as education progresses.Bruner's foundational case for the spiral curriculum has influenced a generation of educators and will continue to be a source of insight into the goals and methods of the educational process.

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INTRODUCTION

EACH generation gives new form to the aspirations that shape education in its time. What may be emerging as a mark of our own generation is a widespread renewal of concern for the quality and intellectual aims of education—but without abandonment of the ideal that education should serve as a means of training well-balanced citizens for a democracy. Rather, we have reached a level of public education in America where a considerable portion of our population has become interested in a question that until recently was the concern of specialists: “What shall we teach and to what end?” The new spirit perhaps reflects the profound scientific revolution of our times as well. The trend is accentuated by what is almost certain to be a long-range crisis in national security, a crisis whose resolution will depend upon a well-educated citizenry.

One of the places in which this renewal of concern has expressed itself is in curriculum planning for the elementary and secondary schools. Several striking developments have taken place. There has been an unprecedented participation in curriculum development by university scholars and scientists, men distinguished for their work at the frontiers of their respective disciplines. They have been preparing courses of study for elementary and secondary schools not only reflecting recent advances in science and scholarship but also embodying bold ideas about the nature of school experience. Perhaps the most highly developed curriculum of this kind is the physics course for high schools prepared by the Physical Science Study Committee, a course for which textbooks, laboratory exercises, films, and special teaching manuals have been prepared, as well as training courses for teachers. Some twenty-five thousand high school students are taking this course, and its impact is now being studied. There are similar projects in the field of mathematics under the supervision of the School Mathematics Study Group, the Commission on Mathematics, the University of Illinois Committee on School Mathematics, and other groups. The Biological Sciences Curriculum Study is constructing a high school biology course, and work of a comparable nature is under way in chemistry and other fields.

The main objective of this work has been to present subject matter effectively—that is, with due regard not only for coverage but also for structure. The daring and imagination that have gone into this work and the remarkable early successes it has achieved have stimulated psychologists who are concerned with the nature of learning and the transmission of knowledge. The Woods Hole Conference, the background and conduct of which are described in the Preface, was one response to this stimulation of interest. Physicists, biologists, mathematicians, historians, educators, and psychologists came together to consider anew the nature of the learning process, its relevance to education, and points at which current curricular efforts have raised new questions about our conceptions of learning and teaching. What shall be taught, when, and how? What kinds of research and inquiry might further the growing effort in the design of curricula? What are the implications of emphasizing the structure of a subject, be it mathematics or history-emphasizing it in a way that seeks to give a student as quickly as possible a sense of the fundamental ideas of a discipline?

An additional word of background is needed to appreciate the significance of present curricular efforts in the changing educational scene. The past half century has witnessed the rise of the American university graduate school with its strong emphasis upon advanced study and research. One consequence of this development has been the growing separation of first-rank scholars and scientists from the task of presenting their own subjects in primary and secondary schools—indeed even in elementary courses for undergraduates. The chief contact between those on the frontiers of scholarship and students in schools was through the occasional textbooks for high schools prepared by such distinguished scientists as Millikan or by historians of the stature of Beard or Commager. For the most part, however, the scholars at the forefront of their disciplines, those who might be able to make the greatest contribution to the substantive reorganization of their fields, were not involved in the development of curricula for the elementary and secondary schools. In consequence, school programs have often dealt inadequately or incorrectly with contemporary knowledge, and we have not reaped the benefits that might have come from a joining of the efforts of eminent scholars, wise and skillful teachers, and those trained in the fields related to teaching and learning. Now there appears to be a reversal of this trend. It consists in the renewed involvement of many of America’s most distinguished scientists in the planning of school study programs in their field, in the preparation of textbooks and laboratory demonstrations, in the construction of films and television programs.

This same half century saw American psychology move away from its earlier concern with the nature of learning as it occurs in school. The psychology of learning tended to become involved with the precise details of learning in highly simplified short-term situations and thereby lost much of its contact with the long-term educational effects of learning. For their part, educational psychologists turned their attention with great effect to the study of aptitude and achievement and to social and motivational aspects of education, but did not concern themselves directly with the intellectual structure of class activities.

Other considerations led to a neglect of curriculum problems by psychologists. The ever-changing pattern of American educational philosophy played a part in the matter as well. There has always been a dualism in our educational ideal, a striving for a balance between what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “useful” and the “ornamental.” As he put it, in the mid-eighteenth century: “It would be well if they could be taught everything that is useful and everything that is ornamental: but art is long and their time is short. It is therefore proposed that they learn those things that are likely to be most useful and most ornamental.” The concept of the useful in Franklin and in the American educational ideal afterwards was twofold: it involved, on the one hand, skills of a specific kind and, on the other, general understanding, to enable one better to deal with the affairs of life. Skills were matters of direct concern to one’s profession. As early as the 1750’s we find Ben Franklin urging that future merchants be taught French, German, and Spanish, and that pupils be taught agriculture, supplemented by farm visits and the like. General understanding was to be achieved through a knowledge of history plus the discipline produced by the diligent study of mathematics and logic, and by training in careful observation of the natural world around one; it required a well-disciplined, well-stocked mind.

The American secondary school has tried to strike a balance between the two concepts of usefulness—and most often with some regard for the ornamental as well. But as the proportion of the population registered in secondary schools increased, and as the proportion of new Americans in the school population went up, the balance between instruction in the useful skills and in disciplined understanding was harder to maintain. Dr. Conant’s recent plea for the comprehensive high school is addressed to the problem of that balance.

It is interesting that around the turn of the last century the conception of the learning process as depicted by psychology gradually shifted away from an emphasis upon the production of general understanding to an emphasis on the acquisition of specific skills. The study of “transfer” provides the type case—the problem of the gain in mastery of other activities that one achieves from having mastered a particular learning task. Whereas the earlier emphasis had led to research studies on the transfer of formal discipline—the value obtained from the training of such “faculties” as analysis, judgment, memory, and so forth—later work tended to explore the transfer of identical elements or specific skills. In consequence, there was relatively little work by American psychologists during the first four decades of this century on the manner in which the student could be trained to grasp the underlying structure or significance of complex knowledge. Virtually all of the evidence of the last two decades on the nature of learning and transfer has indicated that, while the original theory of formal discipline was poorly stated in terms of the training of faculties, it is indeed a fact that massive general transfer can be achieved by appropriate learning, even to the degree that learning properly under optimum conditions leads one to “learn how to learn.” These studies have stimulated a renewed interest in complex learning of a kind that one finds in schools, learning designed to produce general understanding of the structure of a subject matter. Interest in curricular problems at large has, in consequence, been rekindled among psychologists concerned with the learning process.

A word is needed at this point to explain in fuller detail what is meant by the structure of a subject, for we shall have occasion to return to this idea often in later pages. Three simple examples—from biology, from mathematics, and from the learning of language—help to make the idea clearer. Take first a set of observations on an inchworm crossing a sheet of graph paper mounted on a board. The board is horizontal; the animal moves in a straight line. We tilt the board so that the inclined plane or upward grade is 30°. The animal does not go straight up the line of maximum climb, but travels at an angle of 45° from it. We tilt the board to 60°. At what angle does the animal travel with respect to the line of maximum climb? His path now makes a 67½° angle with it, that is, he travels along a line 75° off the vertical. We may thus infer that inchworms “prefer” to travel uphill, if uphill they must go, along an incline of 15°. We have discovered a tropism, as it is called, indeed a geotropism. It is not an isolated fact. We can go on to show that among simple organisms, such phenomena—regulation of locomotion according to a fixed or built-in standard—are the rule. There is a preferred level of illumination toward which lower organisms orient, a preferred level of salinity, of temperature, and so on. Once a student grasps this basic relation between external stimulation and locomotor action, he is well on his way toward being able to handle a good deal of seemingly new but, in fact, highly related information. The swarming of locusts where temperature determines the swarm density in which locusts are forced to travel, the species maintenance of insects at different altitudes on the side of a mountain where crossbreeding is prevented by the tendency of each species to travel in its preferred oxygen zone, and many other phenomena in biology can be understood in the light of tropisms. 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.

Much more briefly, to take an example from mathematics, algebra is a way of arranging knowns and unknowns in equations so that the unknowns are made knowable. The three fundamentals involved in working with these equations are commutation, distribution, and association. Once a student grasps the ideas embodied by these three fundamentals, he is in a position to recognize wherein “new” equations to be solved are not new at all, but variants on a familiar theme. Whether the student knows the formal names of these operations is less important for transfer than whether he is able to use them.

The often unconscious nature of learning structures is perhaps best illustrated in learning one’s native language. Having grasped the subtle structure of a sentence, the child very rapidly learns to generate many other sentences based on this model though different in content from the original sentence learned. And having mastered the rules for transforming sentences without altering their meaning—“The dog bit the man” and “The man was bitten by the dog”—the child is able to vary his sentences much more widely. Yet, while young children are able to use the structural rules of English, they are certainly not able to say what the rules are.

The scientists constructing curricula in physics and mathematics have been highly mindful of the problem of teaching the structure of their subjects, and it may be that their early successes have been due to this emphasis. Their emphasis upon structure has stimulated students of the learning process. The reader will find the emphasis reflected many times in the pages that follow.

Clearly there are general questions to be faced before one can look at specific problems of courses, sequences, and the like. The moment one begins to ask questions about the value of specific courses, one is asking about the objectives of education. The construction of curricula proceeds in a world where changing social, cultural, and political conditions continually alter the surroundings and the goals of schools and their students. We are concerned with curricula designed for Americans, for their ways and their needs in a complex world. Americans are a changing people; their geographical mobility makes imperative some degree of uniformity among high schools and primary schools. Yet the diversity of American communities and of American life in general makes equally imperative some degree of variety in curricula. And whatever the limits placed on education by the demands of diversity and uniformity, there are also requirements for productivity to be met: are we producing enough scholars, scientists, poets, lawmakers, to meet the demands of our times? Moreover, schools must also contribute to the social and emotional development of the child if they are to fulfill their function of education for life in a democratic community and for fruitful family life. If the emphasis in what follows is principally on the intellectual side of education, it is not that the other objectives of education are less important.

We may take as perhaps the most general objective of education that it cultivate excellence; but it should be clear in what sense this phrase is used. It here refers not only to schooling the better student but also to helping each student achieve his optimum intellectual development. Good teaching that emphasizes the structure of a subject is probably even more valuable for the less able student than for the gifted one, for it is the former rather than the latter who is most easily thrown off the track by poor teaching. This is not to say that the pace or the content of courses need be identical for all students—though, as one member of the Conference put it, “When you teach well, it always seems as if seventy-five per cent of the students are above the median.” Careful investigation and research can tell us wherein differences must be introduced. One thing seems clear: if all students are helped to the full utilization of their intellectual powers, we will have a better chance of surviving as a democracy in an age of enormous technological and social complexity.

The chapters that follow will be found to be somewhat specialized in the direction of the sciences and mathematics and how they might best be taught. This should not be taken as a declaration in favor of emphasizing the sciences and scientific training. It is an accident, rather, of historical developments over the last ten years. There has simply been more opportunity to examine progress in these fields, since it is in these fields that most of the experimental curricula have been constructed. Redoubled efforts are essential in the social studies, in the humanities, and in language instruction. A sense of tragedy and triumph achieved through the study of history and literature is surely as important to modern man as a sense of the structure of matter achieved through the study of physics. It should be utterly clear that the humanities, the social studies, and the sciences are all equally in need of imaginative effort if they are to make their proper contribution to the education of coming generations.

The top quarter of public school students, from which we must draw intellectual leadership in the next generation, is perhaps the group most neglected by our schools in the recent past. Improvements in the teaching of science and mathematics may very well accentuate the gaps already observable between talented, average, and slow students in these subjects. Even as they now exist, these gaps raise difficult problems. It is plain that, in general, scientific and mathematical aptitudes can be discovered earlier than other intellectual talents. Ideally, schools should allow students to go ahead in different subjects as rapidly as they can. But the administrative problems that are raised when one makes such an arrangement possible are almost inevitably beyond the resources that schools have available for dealing with them. The answer will probably lie in some modification or abolition of the system of grade levels in some subjects, notably mathematics, along with a program of course enrichment in other subjects. Questions about the enrichment and the special handling of gifted students will doubtless persuade the more enlightened and wealthier schools to modify current practices. But we can certainly ill afford as a nation to allow local inadequacies to inhibit the development of children born into relatively poor towns or regions.

Four themes are developed in the chapters that follow. The first of these has already been introduced: the role of structure in learning and how it may be made central in teaching. The approach taken is a practical one. Students, perforce, have a limited exposure to the materials they are to learn. How can this exposure be made to count in their thinking for the rest of their lives? The dominant view among men who have been engaged in preparing and teaching new curricula is that the answer to this question lies in giving students an understanding of the fundamental structure of whatever subjects we choose to teach. This is a minimum requirement for using knowledge, for bringing it to bear on problems and events one encounters outside a classroom—or in classrooms one enters later in one’s training. 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. There are many things that go into learning of this kind, not the least of which are supporting habits and skills that make possible the active use of the materials one has come to understand. 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.

Given the importance of this t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface, 1977
• Preface
• Contents
• 1: Introduction
• 2: The Importance of Structure
• 3: Readiness for Learning
• 4: Intuitive and Analytic Thinking
• 5: Motives for Learning
• 6: Aids to Teaching
• Index