Education: The New Learning

The bold hypothesis: “Any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest way to any child at any stage of development.” The method: early emphasis on the “structure” of each subject —the most basic ideas underlying all science, math and literature. Once grasped, the basics free the mind to explore more complex things with a growing “sense of excitement about discovery.”

Thus noted Harvard Psychologist Jerome S. Bruner, in The Process of Education (Harvard University Press; $2.75), summarizes the experience of 35 top scholars, who pooled their theories for improving science teaching last year at a ten-day meeting called by the National Academy of Sciences at Woods Hole, Mass.

As Bruner sees it, mere “mastery of facts and techniques” in education is a dead end. The child learns only part of the story, and unconnected facts have “a pitiably short half-life in memory.” Indeed, the only facts worth knowing are those that reconstruct details when needed, e.g., basic scientific formulas. So too, the child must be given the kind of facts that lure him onward. It is one thing to show him a black dot on the map called Chicago. It is altogether different to teach him the basics of social and economic geography—and then give him a map with physical features but no place names. He may locate Chicago at the junction of the three lakes, near the Mesabi range or on the rich soil of Iowa. But he has given thought to the matter.

Understandable Terms. When is he “ready” to give thought to what? “As far as I am concerned,” says Mathematician David Page of the University of Illinois, “young children learn almost anything faster than adults do if it can be given to them in terms they understand.” Apart from re-educating teachers in the real fundamentals of their subjects, the trick is “translation” to the child’s way of viewing things at each stage of mental development.

Swiss Psychologist Bärbel Inhelder suggests some translations. For example, a five-year-old thinks that a tall glass contains more water than a flat bowl. Shown that glass and bowl contain equal amounts, he is learning the principle of the invariance of quantities. In fact, a grade school teacher with a roulette wheel may turn out students more skilled in probabilistic reasoning than a college professor with a course in statistics.

Courageous Leap. Psychologist Inhelder thinks that the first two years of school might be devoted to just such exercises, a “pre-curriculum” that would make formal science and math easier later on. Psychologist Bruner suggests that literature may be taught the same way. Given the first part of a story, a child could be trained to complete it as a tragedy or a farce long before he understood those words. A young child should be introduced early to great human themes. “A curriculum ought to be built around the great issues, principles and values that a society deems worthy of the continual concern of its members.”

One obstacle to such learning, says Bruner, is the lack of intuitive thinking in U.S. schools. “The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion—these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work.” Yet in most schools, “guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.” The trend is to analysis—and not necessarily the thinking kind.