Jerome Bruner Quotes

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

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.

Learners are encouraged to discover facts and relationships for themselves.

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

Being able to "go beyond the information" given to "figure things out" is one of the few untarnishable joys of life.

In reference to right answers - Knowing is a process, not a product.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The fish will be the last to discover water.

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

Knowledge helps only when it descends into habits.

Teaching is the canny art of intellectual temptation

It is sentimentalism to assume that the teaching of life can always be fitted to the child's interests, just as it is empty formalism to force the child to parrot the formulas of adult society. Interests can be created and stimulated.

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.

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.

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.

Knowledge is justified belief.

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.

Agency presupposes choice.