I like aphorisms, if they’re thought-provoking and not pat. Good aphorisms are like good melodies: they tap into the inevitable without being at all predictable.<\/p>\n
One of my favorite aphorists of education is a man named Jerome Bruner. I’m not sure what he’s doing now, but in the mid-1990’s he was Research Professor of Psychology and Senior Research Fellow in Law at New York University. He’s certainly a member of my Secret Societry for Real School. I’ve long been in love with his book The Culture of Education<\/em>, and long intended (as I pave the road to Hell, alas) to read his other books as well. In any event, here are a few choice quotations that are short and pithy enough to qualify as aphorisms by my standards. And if the quotations are really too long to be aphorisms, then I claim blogger’s license.<\/p>\n I’m very grateful Bruner wrote them down, and that I can share them with you.<\/p>\n Indeed, the very institutionalization of schooling may get in the way of creating a subcommunity of learners who bootstrap each other.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Nothing is “culture free,” but neither are individuals simply mirrors of their culture. It is the interaction between them that both gives a communal cast to individual thought and imposes a certain unpredictable richness on any culture’s way of life, thought, or feeling.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n School … [is] both an exercise in consciousness raising about the possibilities of communal mental activity, and … a means for acquiring knowledge and skill.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n [E]ducation is a major embodiment of a culture’s way of life, not just a preparation for it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n [T]he metalinguistic<\/em> gift, the capacity to “turn around” on our language to examine and transcend its limits, is within everybody’s reach.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The chief subject matter of school, viewed culturally, is school itself. This is how most students experience it, and it determines what meaning they make of it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n [E]ducation is too consequential to too many constituencies to leave to professional educators.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Finding a place in the world, for all that it implicates the immediacy of home, mate, job, and friends, is ultimately an act of the imagination.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I like aphorisms, if they’re thought-provoking and not pat. Good aphorisms are like good melodies: they tap into the inevitable without being at all predictable. One of my favorite aphorists of education is a man named Jerome Bruner. I’m not … Continue reading