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.

Learners are encouraged to discover facts and relationships for themselves.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

The fish will be the last to discover water.

Teaching is the canny art of intellectual temptation

Knowledge helps only when it descends into habits.

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.

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

Knowledge is justified belief.

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

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

Agency presupposes choice.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Stimuli, however, do not act upon an indifferent organism.

In sum, then, "thinking about thinking" has to be a principal ingredient of any empowering practice of education.