Preface Culture, Mind, and Education Folk Pedagogy The Complexity of Educational Aims Teaching the Present, Past, and Possible Understanding and Explaining Other Minds Narratives of Science The Narrative Construal of Reality Knowing as Doing Psychology's Next Chapter Notes Credits Index
Jerome Bruner was University Professor at New York University.
In a breathless, lurching, yet somehow deeply consecutive career
spanning nearly sixty years, Bruner has brushed against almost
every line of thought in psychology and transformed a number of
them...[This book] is dedicated to tracing out the implications of
[the] view of narrative as "both a mode of thought and an
expression of a culture's world view." There are inquiries into the
teaching of science, into "folk pedagogy," into the collaborative
nature of learning, and into the child's construction of "a theory
of mind" to explain and understand other minds. Autism as the
inability to develop such a theory, the formal features of
narrative, culture as praxis, and the approaches to education of
Vygotsky, Piaget, and Pierre Bourdieu, related to Bruner's but in
some tension with it, are all discussed. So are recent developments
in primatology, cross-cultural studies of education, IQ testing,
the role of the teacher, "metacognition" ("thinking about one's
thinking"), relativism, and the uses of neurology...[C]ultural
psychology [is] evolving rapidly...At the climax of what is surely
one of the most extraordinary and productive careers in the human
sciences, a career of continuous originality and tireless
exploration, Jerome Bruner may have produced a more revolutionary
revolution than even he altogether appreciates.
*New York Review of Books*
[A] multi-disciplinary examination of the foundations of thought
and human action...Bruner casts his nets widely, drawing on
concepts and empirical examples from a broad variety of academic
sources ranging from philosophy, rhetoric, and literature to
paleontology and primatology.
*Journal of the Learning Sciences*
[This is] an exceedingly important book for those of us who are
responsible for schools. We all must read The Culture of Education
and ponder its message...Bruner asks once again the big questions
that lie behind human learning and thus formal schooling...Most
important, Bruner's careful and often elegant arguments gently
persuade us that some of the most deeply rooted contemporary ideas
about schooling, and the policies and practices that flow from
them, are as obsolete and wrong-headed as they are
well-intentioned.
*The American School Board Journal*
As in everything Bruner writes...there is the stamp of imaginative
energy, an exceptional breadth of reading and subtle thought.
*Nature*
This is an enormously important book. It is a book of essays about
education in which curriculum and standards and testing hardly get
a mention although the issue of standards of conduct of
professional educators is implicit throughout. It is a book which,
if properly appreciated, would prepare the minds of educators at
all levels to meet the challenge facing education now and over the
next decades. The text is elegantly written and yet there is an
almost desperate sense of urgency in the power of the arguments. It
is a-political in a party sense whilst recognising that education
is necessarily a political issue. It deals with profoundly complex
matters in a clear and forthright way as one would expect of the
author. It is free of rhetorical devices save the stridency of the
arguments themselves...The book brings together, in coherent form,
a vast collection of powerful ideas from a range of fields and
brings them to bear on the challenge of education at all levels. It
is a tour de force...a masterly foundation for those who have the
courage to adopt a cultural approach to education.
*British Journal of Educational Psychology*
Bruner is a legendary figure in psychology and education...[He] has
been the embodiment of all that is right about the academic future,
anticipating the field and laying the groundwork for those who
followed...[Here] Bruner is once again leading the way to the
reunification of mind, culture, and semiosis. We hope that the
field is wise enough to follow.
*Culture, Education, and Semiotics*
This original consideration of the link between education and
culture lives up to the Bruner standard of insightful, provocative,
and essentially hopeful discourse...In a long first essay he
outlines a series of tenets, ranging from the need to foster
self-esteem in children to the importance of the narrative mode by
which children come to recognize themselves and find a place in the
culture. The essays that follow enlarge on these themes with
telling commentary on contemporary society. The last chapter spells
out why Bruner feels that if psychology is to better understand
human nature and the human condition it must master the interplay
between biology and culture...The general reader will find this an
exhilarating notion well supported by this wonderfully argued
work.
*Kirkus Reviews*
Among readers serious about educational philosophy, Bruner's study
will earn high praise.
*Booklist*
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