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jerome bruner and the process of education
Jerome Bruner has made a profound contribution to our appreciation of the process of education and to the development of curriculum theory. We explore his work and draw out some important lessons for informal educators and those concerned with the practice of lifelong learning.
contents: introduction · jerome s. bruner - his life · the process ofeducation · the culture of education · conclusion · further reading and references · links

It is surely the case that schooling is only one small part of how a culture inducts the young into its canonical ways. Indeed, schooling may even be at odds with a culture's other ways of inducting the young into the requirements of communal living.... What has become increasingly clear... is thateducation is not just about conventional school matters like curriculum or standards or testing. What we resolve to do in school only makes sense when considered in the broader context of what the society intends to accomplish through its educational investment in the young. How one conceives of education, we have finally come to recognize, is a function of how one conceives of culture and its aims,professed and otherwise. (Jerome S. Bruner 1996: ix-x)

Jerome S. Bruner (1915- ) is one of the best known and influential psychologists of the twentieth century. He was one of the key figures in the so called 'cognitive revolution' - but it is the field of education that his influence has been especially felt. His books The Process of Education and Towards a Theory of Instruction have been widelyread and become recognized as classics, and his work on the social studies programme - Man: A Course of Study (MACOS) - in the mid-1960s is a landmark in curriculum development. More recently Bruner has come to be critical of the 'cognitive revolution' and has looked to the building of a cultural psychology that takes proper account of the historical and social context of participants. In his 1996book The Culture of Education these arguments were developed with respect to schooling (and education more generally). 'How one conceives of education', he wrote, 'we have finally come to recognize, is a function of how one conceives of the culture and its aims, professed and otherwise' (Bruner 1996: ix-x).
Jerome S. Bruner - life

Bruner was born in New York City and later educated at DukeUniversity and Harvard (from which he was awarded a PhD in 1947). During World War II, Bruner worked as a social psychologist exploring propaganda public opinion and social attitudes for U.S. Army intelligence. After obtaining his PhD he became a member of faculty, serving as professor of psychology, as well as cofounder and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies.

Beginning in the 1940s,Jerome Bruner, along with Leo Postman, worked on the ways in which needs, motivations, and expectations (or 'mental sets') influence perception. Sometimes dubbed as the 'New Look', they explored perception from a functional orientation (as against a process to separate from the world around it). In addition to this work, Bruner began to look at the role of strategies in the process of humancategorization, and more generally, the development of human cognition. This concern with cognitive psychology led to a particular interest in the cognitive development of children (and their modes of representation) and just what the appropriate forms of education might be.

From the late 1950s on Jerome Bruner became interested in schooling in the USA - and was invited to chair an influential tenday meeting of scholars and educators at Woods Hole on Cape Cod in 1959 (under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation). One result was Bruner's landmark book The Process of Education (1960). It developed some of the key themes of that meeting and was an crucial factor in the generation of a range of educational programmes and experiments in the 1960s....