Bloom
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Publicado: 8 de agosto de 2012
The following text also appears in Prospects: the quarterly review of comparative education (Paris, UNESCO: International Bureau of Education), vol. XXX, no. 3, September 2000. ©UNESCO: International Bureau of Education, 2000 This document may be reproduced free of charge as long as acknowledgement is made of the source.
BENJAMIN BLOOM
1913–99
Elliot W. Eisner1 About five feet five inches(1.65 m) in height, Ben Bloom was not a very large man, but his physical stature in no way reflected his presence in a room or the stature he achieved in the field of education. It was, I confess, a kind of anomaly to see someone who had few physically imposing qualities carry so much weight in a conversation and with so much of an aura. Benjamin S. Bloom was born on 21 February 1913 in Lansford,Pennsylvania, and died on 13 September 1999. He received a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1935 and a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Chicago in March 1942. He became a staff member of the Board of Examinations at the University of Chicago in 1940 and served in that capacity until 1943, at which time he became university examiner, a position he helduntil 1959. His initial appointment as an instructor in the Department of Education at the University of Chicago began in 1944 and he was eventually appointed Charles H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in 1970. He served as educational adviser to the governments of Israel, India and numerous other nations. These are some of the facts pertaining to his life and career. To know the man and hiswork, however, we must delve into what he stood for and what he accomplished as a teacher, a scholar and a researcher in the field of education. That is the story I would like to tell.
Bloom as a teacher
I had my first contact with Ben Bloom as a student in the Department of Education at the University of Chicago. He was one of my teachers. The course, and I remember it quite well, was entitled‘Education as a Field of Study’. Our aim in that course was to try to understand the kinds of questions that might be asked about the field of education and to explore the various ways in which those questions might be answered. It was a mixture of the conceptual analysis of a complex concept and an introduction to the forms of inquiry that would result in a research project. One aspect of thecourse focused on the use of statistics and the calculation of probability. The approach that Bloom took was to help us understand probability experientially. Unlike most instructors, who would be inclined to provide a theoretical explanation of the meaning of probability, Bloom had each of us toss coins and record the number of heads and tails produced in a number of trials. He then had the classcombine their respective ‘scores’, which of course yielded a relatively smooth bell-shaped curve describing the distribution of occasions on which heads or tails appeared. His willingness to devote the time in a graduate class to the actual production of an event in order to increase the meaningfulness of the idea of probability was emblematic of what always seemed to me to be a kind of hard-nosedprogressivism that characterized his orientation to education and especially to the assessment of the educational consequences he thought important. 1
Bloom’s strength as a teacher was not due to the fact that he was the most articulate on the faculty at Chicago at the time; he was not. It was not because he necessarily invented the most creative learning activities that graduate students mightengage in; he did not. What Bloom had to offer his students was a model of an inquiring scholar, someone who embraced the idea that education as a process was an effort to realize human potential, indeed, even more, it was an effort designed to make potential possible. Education was an exercise in optimism. Bloom’s commitment to the possibilities of education provided for many of us who studied...
BENJAMIN BLOOM
1913–99
Elliot W. Eisner1 About five feet five inches(1.65 m) in height, Ben Bloom was not a very large man, but his physical stature in no way reflected his presence in a room or the stature he achieved in the field of education. It was, I confess, a kind of anomaly to see someone who had few physically imposing qualities carry so much weight in a conversation and with so much of an aura. Benjamin S. Bloom was born on 21 February 1913 in Lansford,Pennsylvania, and died on 13 September 1999. He received a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1935 and a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Chicago in March 1942. He became a staff member of the Board of Examinations at the University of Chicago in 1940 and served in that capacity until 1943, at which time he became university examiner, a position he helduntil 1959. His initial appointment as an instructor in the Department of Education at the University of Chicago began in 1944 and he was eventually appointed Charles H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in 1970. He served as educational adviser to the governments of Israel, India and numerous other nations. These are some of the facts pertaining to his life and career. To know the man and hiswork, however, we must delve into what he stood for and what he accomplished as a teacher, a scholar and a researcher in the field of education. That is the story I would like to tell.
Bloom as a teacher
I had my first contact with Ben Bloom as a student in the Department of Education at the University of Chicago. He was one of my teachers. The course, and I remember it quite well, was entitled‘Education as a Field of Study’. Our aim in that course was to try to understand the kinds of questions that might be asked about the field of education and to explore the various ways in which those questions might be answered. It was a mixture of the conceptual analysis of a complex concept and an introduction to the forms of inquiry that would result in a research project. One aspect of thecourse focused on the use of statistics and the calculation of probability. The approach that Bloom took was to help us understand probability experientially. Unlike most instructors, who would be inclined to provide a theoretical explanation of the meaning of probability, Bloom had each of us toss coins and record the number of heads and tails produced in a number of trials. He then had the classcombine their respective ‘scores’, which of course yielded a relatively smooth bell-shaped curve describing the distribution of occasions on which heads or tails appeared. His willingness to devote the time in a graduate class to the actual production of an event in order to increase the meaningfulness of the idea of probability was emblematic of what always seemed to me to be a kind of hard-nosedprogressivism that characterized his orientation to education and especially to the assessment of the educational consequences he thought important. 1
Bloom’s strength as a teacher was not due to the fact that he was the most articulate on the faculty at Chicago at the time; he was not. It was not because he necessarily invented the most creative learning activities that graduate students mightengage in; he did not. What Bloom had to offer his students was a model of an inquiring scholar, someone who embraced the idea that education as a process was an effort to realize human potential, indeed, even more, it was an effort designed to make potential possible. Education was an exercise in optimism. Bloom’s commitment to the possibilities of education provided for many of us who studied...
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