The Culture of Education

By Jerome Bruner

Book Overview

What we don't know about learning could fill a book--and it might be a schoolbook. In a masterly commentary on the possibilities of education, the eminent psychologist Jerome Bruner reveals how education can usher children into their culture, though it often fails to do so. Applying the newly emerging "cultural psychology" to education, Bruner proposes that the mind reaches its full potential only through participation in the culture--not just its more formal arts and sciences, but its ways of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and carrying out discourse. By examining both educational practice and educational theory, Bruner explores new and rich ways of approaching many of the classical problems that perplex educators.

Education, Bruner reminds us, cannot be reduced to mere information processing, sorting knowledge into categories. Its objective is to help learners construct meanings, not simply to manage information. Meaning making requires an understanding of the ways of one's culture--whether the subject in question is social studies, literature, or science. The Culture of Education makes a forceful case for the importance of narrative as an instrument of meaning making. An embodiment of culture, narrative permits us to understand the present, the past, and the humanly possible in a uniquely human way.

Going well beyond his earlier acclaimed books on education, Bruner looks past the issue of achieving individual competence to the question of how education equips individuals to participate in the culture on which life and livelihood depend. Educators, psychologists, and students of mind and culture will find in this volume an unsettling criticism that challenges our current conventional practices--as well as a wise vision that charts a direction for the future.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674179536
• ISBN13: 9780674179530
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Practical Bruner

What I enjoyed most about Bruner's practical and insightful collection of essays collected in this book is his wisdom. Bruner's contribution to education, after years researching and engineering much of the Cognitive Revolution in psychology, has to be acknowledged. Specifically, I enjoyed his emphasis on "intersubjectivity," a term used to described the process of learning using cultural, social stimuli in collusion with internal cognitive processes. Bruner repeatedly stresses the balance needed to sustain the view that individuals learn within their environment as well as through their biological background. Keep this book in your library; it will be one that you underline and refer to frequently.

Bruner's "The Culture of Education"

This book is a gift for readers. Maybe not all readers, but those who are genuinely interested in human values and culture. Bruner's ideas are bright and deep, making us understand that the future of education depends on human beings as agents of their destiny. The importance of every culture's history and the transmission of experiences is only possible through human interactions. We cannot be naive and think that technology is not an instrument of culture. It is, and we must acknowledge it, otherwise we will be overridden by it. But, education is only possible by means of intersubjective exchanges: they are the key to the development of human beings.