Author’s Note: This year I took the plunge into the final frontier of education, a doctorate at Northern Illinois University. This post is for a final presentation on a groundbreaking theorist in Curriculum and Instructional Design. I was assigned Dr. Jerome Bruner. The more I researched, the more I saw how extraordinary Bruner was. His insights fuel our modern education system today. Given my 6-8 minute presentation limit, my blog post is far more limited than it could have been. Despite the short length, I hope I convey his brilliance on education.
The Flaws of Behaviorism: Blindness as an asset
Jerome Seymour Bruner was born in New York City in 1915. Until cataracts were repaired, he was blind. Those years of without sight would shape his research years later. Like Vygotsky in Russia, Bruner’s research at Harvard in the 40s and 50s turned on its head the standard theory of the time that perception was based on responses to external stimuli. Bruner found this theory inadequate as he himself had had personally experienced development without any visual external stimuli. Bruner wondered if it was actually the brain that played the more central role in perception instead through a social lens. The “New Look in Perception” approach (Greenfield, 2016) was confirmed Bruner and Cecile C. Goodman coin experiment in 1947 .
10-year-old children (N=30) were asked to estimate the size of various coins. As seen the chart above, regardless of socioeconomic class, children overestimated the size of all coin denominations. Nevertheless, there was a statistically significant difference between poor and rich students with poor children having a significantly larger positive deviation from the actual coin sizes. The study suggests, “the greater the subjective need for a socially valued object, the greater will be the role of behavioral determinants of perception” (p. 39).
This is relevant to contemporary educational practices because it indicates a level of rationality behind the varied effort levels of students. If class participation in activities is defined as the object, then students will perceive the relative importance of an activity differently. A child from a rich family may have seen wealth as a direct consequence of educational achievements such as college graduation. Thus, they will participate more than children who have no role models that show the importance of academic success as a way towards prosperity. Though it might be seen as brash or untenable, this situation could be ameliorated if good grades were rewarded with cash payments to students. The upside here is that it would more directly address the “subjective need” of poorer students, and the payments would not have to be large since poorer students would accentuate even small payments.
Over sixty years later at 95 years old, Bruner would still be talking about inequality in American society and its detrimental effects on education:
“If I were to write another book tomorrow about education, I would be more concerned with these endemic, principally domestic cultural matters that impose such unspeakable inequalities on our presumably democratic society. It’s a society in which a smaller and smaller proportion of the population each year owns a larger and larger proportion of the wealth. How do you expect a country of this sort to begin to develop a sense of possibility among its population?… We’ve got to stop thinking about education as if it stopped at the schoolhouse door.” -Jerome Bruner
His message remains relevant in post-COVID America – just as it was in 2010 at the tail end of the Great Recession. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2016 before publishing what would have been a sobering read.
The Process of Education
Bruner’s trajectory changed along with the country’s following the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union.
While the satellite exhibited nothing more offensive than an annoying radio beep, it led to a deep fear that the two-time World War champions were falling behind. Bruner led a team of academics in an effort to address the perceived failures of the American education system. The result was his book, The Process of Education, in 1960 and updated in 1977 (NYU, 2010). In it he addresses this very issue:
The Soviet Union’s conquests in space, its capability of producing not only powerful weapons but also an effective industrial society, have shaken American complacency to a degree that, looking back, would have seemed inconceivable a decade ago – Jerome Bruner (Bruner, 1977, p. 75)
One of the central hypotheses of the book was “that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development” (Bruner, 1977, p. 33). The author even admits that this is “bold” (33). After all, other theorists such as Jean Piaget argue that children can learn different depths of knowledge at different stages of development. Bruner contends that these developmental stages can be adjusted for through a “spiraling curriclum”: a series of scaffolds that adjust the depth of knowledge and supports around the concept (p. 52-53). For example, Bruner notes that a child does not need to wait until tenth grade to take biology. Instead, children can be exposed to “major biological ideas earlier, in a spirit perhaps less exact and more intuitive” (p. 54). That approach is very different from what we see today. The spiraling curriculum can be seen throughout my field of political science. Take a look at the Illinois Social Science Standards for Civics on Pages 13 and 14:
No student who graduated from an American high school will enter my college classroom without a good familiarization with civics. Students in my US Government class studied the topic in elementary, middle, and high school levels. With each ‘spiral’ the importance of civics was expanded and explained further.
At least as of 2007, the pedagogy of spiraling was not universal. Science was often taught in America as “layered” method: one subject per year. On the other hand, the Chinese science curriculum used spiraling curriculum:
The application of spiraling to Chinese education led to twice as much instructional time spent on chemistry than American students. Chinese students spent almost 3 times as much time studying physics than their American counterpart (Herr, 2007). Might this account for Americans scoring lower than Chinese students on the OECD’s PISA 2022 Science Literacy Test (NCES, 2024)? While this is possible, further details of the pedagogies would be necessary to prove this. After all, American students may have underachieved versus the Chinese and four other countries, but they also did significantly better than 16 other countries and scored the OECD average.
What today we might classify as a type of scaffolding, Bruner discussed through the importance of “intuitive thinking”, which refers to learning techniques that use heuristics (for example, analogies) rather than algorithms to solve problems (Chp 4). No historian would learn EVERY single fact about a focus period, Bruner explains, rather they would use intuitive thinking to determine the most important, relevant sources for their research (65-66). He also mentioned the aid to teaching of “automatizing devices, teaching machines” these devices were essentially rudimentary calculators (83). In today’s world, generative AI programs such as Curipod and Englightenme can provide similar personalization of learning. For example, one could do an exit ticket on topics learned in the class. Upon submission, AI could with the proper prep from the instructor provide immediate personalized feedback to each students so that they leave the room with a better conception than before.
This advice is necessary but not sufficient today. Bruner did not need to address the Internet as it was not even invented until 1969 and widely used until 1994. The conception of intuitive thinking is still relevant but must be put into a larger framework: Lateral Reading. That is to say, students should not “go down a rabbit hole” on one site, but rather review “articles on the same topic by other writers” and question these texts for credibility (News Literacy Project, 2024). By going to multiple sites, students can start to develop that intuitive feeling by internalizing the skepticism necessary to find objective truth. By extension their personal social media use could definitely use this varietal of intuitive thinking.
Conclusion: Motivation
Finally, Bruner understood that a full education cannot be distilled into high-stakes testing. Faced with the rise of the Soviet Union, Bruner addressed three fears: an over reliance on meritocracy where those that do not immediately rise to the top are abandoned by the system, an over emphasis on STEM, and a underemphasis of the humanistic learning. All three actions would reduce “motives for learning” amongst many of the student and thus have a deleterious effect (Bruner, 1977, p. 80.). These still seem to be major challenges for the education system. The first was exacerbated by No Child Left Behind as it forced testing that did turn the system into a direct competition for funds. I doubt we need to revisit the other two as they are almost universally a concern in the educational system. Bruner was ahead of his time and a groundbreaker in psychological applications to education.
References
Bruner, J. S. (Jerome S. (1977). The process of education / Jerome S. Bruner. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674028999
Butko, Andre. “Первый в мире искусственный спутник Земли” (Sputnik Image). Wikimedia Commons. Sept 17 2008.
Greenfield, P. Jerome Bruner (1915–2016). Nature 535, 232 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/535232a
Herr https://www.csun.edu/science/books/sourcebook/chapters/24-curriculum/graphics/layered-spiraling.html
J. S. Bruner et al. J. Abnorm. Soc. Psychol. 42, 33–44; 1947
NCES: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2022/science/international-comparisons/
Expand your view with lateral reading — News Literacy Project
NYU, 2010 Jerome Bruner’s seminal book on education celebrated at 50th anniversary event | NYU School of Law
Andrew Levin 