Education: To Raise Man's Potential

(3 of 3)

Faster Thinking. Still, the Center recognizes and studies the limitations that immaturity puts on learning. According to Switzerland's Jean Piaget, top scholar on the subject, the toddler is an egocentric who understands things only in terms of what he does about them ("A hole is to dig"). A five-year-old cannot grasp the principle of the conservation of quantity; he thinks that a piece of clay becomes "bigger" when it is flattened. The idea of transitivity eludes seven-year-olds, who cannot understand the statement: "A is bigger than B, and B is bigger than C, means that A is bigger than C."

Translating the "structure" of many abstract subjects is thus no simple matter. Nonetheless, Bruner and his colleagues hope to build on Piaget's pioneering research. They feel almost certain that mental development can be speeded, that children can be led from level to level much faster. This year Piaget's associate, Psychologist Barbel Inhelder, is at Harvard to experiment in possible techniques. For example, six-year-olds cannot see several aspects of one phenomenon. They assume that one car is going faster than another because it reaches a goal first. It may really have started closer to the target, and Psychologist Inhelder will use toy cars to demonstrate. "There may be a rule that the exercise of a function leads to its further development," suggests Bruner.

The only certain thing is the rich promise of the task. "When we understand the cognitive processes," says Explorer Bruner, "we will certainly be able to design education that will use man's potential for learning far more effectively than it has been used before."