Quotes from Jerome Bruner

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.

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

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

Knowledge helps only when it descends into habits.

Knowledge is justified belief.

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

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

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

Teaching is the canny art of intellectual temptation

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

The fish will be the last to discover water.

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 best way to understand something is to try to change it.

Discovery is the ability to see what everybody else has seen and to think what nobody else has thought.

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

We are capable of generating an almost infinite number of narratives about the same event, and it is the interpretation of the event that matters, not just the event itself.

One of the great triumphs of learning (and of teaching) is to get things organised in your head in a way that permits you to know more than you "ought" to.

Character and the company of identities that constitute it seem to emerge at times of crisis in the life of man.

We are not just information processors, we are meaning makers.

Culture and education are two sides of the same coin, and we cannot understand one without understanding the other.

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

The purpose of education is to produce autonomous learners who can continue to learn after they leave school.

After a while the introvert develops strong extraversive needs; the man whose life has been governed exclusively by thinking craves in time the guide of feeling; the literal man searches eventually for ways of intuiting. So with the principal actors within the human character. Their rebellious understudies, if I may so designate them, are often of opposite persuasion.

Education is not just about learning facts, but about learning how to learn.