"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".
—Jerome Bruner (1915-2016)
"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".
—Jerome Bruner (1915-2016)
"Learners are encouraged to discover facts and relationships for themselves".
—Jerome Bruner (1915-2016)
"Stimuli, however, do not act upon an indifferent organism".
—Jerome Bruner (1915-2016)
“We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.”
—Jerome Bruner (1915-2016)
"Knowing and communicating are in their nature highly interdependent, indeed virtually inseparable".
—Jerome Bruner (1915-2016)
"Learning and thinking are always situated in a cultural setting and always dependent upon the utilization of cultural resources".
—Jerome Bruner (1915-2016)
"Old wine does not improve much for being poured into differently shaped bottles, even if the glass is clearer".
—Jerome Bruner (1915-2016)
"Understanding something in one way does not preclude understanding it in other ways".
—Jerome Bruner (1915-2016)
"An educational enterprise that fails to take the risks involved becomes stagnant and eventually alienating".
—Jerome Bruner (1915-2016)
"'Thinking about thinking' has to be a principal ingredient of any empowering practice of education".
—Jerome Bruner (1915-2016)
"Knowledge helps only when it descends into habits".
—Jerome Bruner (1915-2016)