Jerome Bruner quotes

Learners are encouraged to discover facts and relationships for themselves.
-- Jerome Bruner

#Facts #Learners

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

#Inspirational #Education #Thinking

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

#Lonely #Space #Empty

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

#Children #Teaching #Learning

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

#Creativity #Thinking #Order

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

#Children #Stories #Language

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.
-- Jerome Bruner

#Children #Development #Taught

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.
-- Jerome Bruner

#Views #Culture #Alternatives

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.
-- Jerome Bruner

#Art #Real #Effort

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.
-- Jerome Bruner

#Inspirational #Education #Men

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.
-- Jerome Bruner

#Education #School #Coins

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.
-- Jerome Bruner

#Children #Play #Adults

The fish will be the last to discover water.
-- Jerome Bruner

#Inspirational #Life #Water

Agency presupposes choice.
-- Jerome Bruner

#Agency #Choices

Knowledge is justified belief.
-- Jerome Bruner

#Philosophy #Educational #Literature

Teaching is the canny art of intellectual temptation
-- Jerome Bruner

#Art #Teaching #Learning

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

#Simple #Thinking #Identity

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

#Passion #Feelings #Use

Stimuli, however, do not act upon an indifferent organism.
-- Jerome Bruner

#Stimulus #Indifferent

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.
-- Jerome Bruner

#Educational #Light #Design

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.
-- Jerome Bruner

#Perception #Recognition #Characteristics

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

#Music #Age #Foundation

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.
-- Jerome Bruner

#Memories #Loss #Ideas

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

#Philosophy #Educational #Understanding

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.
-- Jerome Bruner

#Writing #Apollo #Culture

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

#Teacher #Teaching #Taste

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.
-- Jerome Bruner

#Views #Mind #Stories

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

#Self #Needs #Agents

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.
-- Jerome Bruner

#Self #Effort #Doe

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.
-- Jerome Bruner

#Way #Becoming #Literacy

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.
-- Jerome Bruner

#Benefits #Anticipation #Turns

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

#Children #Teaching #Cutting

Knowledge helps only when it descends into habits.
-- Jerome Bruner

#Philosophy #Educational #Literature