Education: To Raise Man's Potential

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"Act of Discovery." Psychologist Bruner, whose passion is perception, was born blind 46 years ago. He first saw the world at two, when cataracts were removed from his eyes; his thick glasses still make him look perpetually astonished at what he sees. A native New Yorker, Bruner got into psychology by a fluke: Duke University expelled him for cutting compulsory chapel, relented only when his psychology professor (newly arrived from Harvard) pleaded that he was too bright to fire. Bruner spent the rest of his chapel periods in the lab studying intelligence in rats, went on to a Ph.D. at Harvard, wound up as a psychological warfare expert on Eisenhower's staff in Europe.

Back at Harvard, Teacher Bruner got fascinated with the thought processes of children; in one study, for example, he learned that high-value coins look bigger to poor children than to rich children. He plunged into work with emotionally retarded learners, found that their major block was a fear of losing attention if they made any real progress in learning. Bruner got results by ridding them of reliance on external rewards or punishments. Working with normal children, he soon decided that learning is best achieved by freeing the human instinct to synthesize—in sum, by stressing the "act of discovery."

Form on the Unknown. But children have to be taught to discover. One of Bruner's colleagues illustrates the problem with games like Twenty Questions. Premise: "A car had a bad accident. How did it happen? Ask me questions that can only be answered with a yes or no." Young children jump immediately to the "closed stage" of a hypothesis: "Was it a boy in the car and his mother was rushing him to the doctor because he cut his finger and the car went off the road?" The young do not grasp problem-solving as a process of elimination. "Cognitive simplicity is a virtue of maturity," says Bruner. Only as they grow older do they ask "open hypothesis" questions: "Was it night? Was the driver tired? Was it raining?" Then they zero in on the answer.

Bruner suggests that training can change all this. He believes that imposing form on the unknown is not only the point of education but also the most efficient way of learning. "The process and the goal of education are one and the same thing," says Bruner. This kind of learning shuns external pressures, such as being forced to bone up on unrelated facts. The discovery of relationships becomes a game in which success or failure is simply a matter of being on the right or wrong track. And the child best remembers what he him self discovered. Such ideas led Bruner to theorize that "any subject can be taught to any child" if the most basic ideas underlying the subject can be translated into the child's way of seeing things.