Process of Education

Jerome Bruner was University Professor at New York University.

There are some rare and wondrous occasions in reading when one has a tremendous sense of the presence of power, the feeling that there is some very special significance in the pages… Here is a book about the educational process, hardly a subject to make banners float in the sky or to call forth a choir of angels. Here is a book by a psychologist writing about the nature of learning, the structure of knowledge, and the means by which the former is engaged and the latter is acquired. Yet this book can be read twice in a week, will keep the television set dark, and will neutralize the lure of a late summer’s night… That he writes on occasion with the touch of a poet is the reader’s good fortune; that he reasons with the scientist’s secure modesty makes his vision understandable… [Bruner] has written a useful, satisfying, and, for me, a very exciting book.

• 1. Introduction