Photo by Martin Argles, from a recent interview in The Guardian

Just when I think Jerome Bruner has extended my horizons all the way from Virginia to the Antipodes, I read something else by him that demonstrates how much farther I need to stretch. Two days ago I read what may be the single best essay on education I’ve ever read–and given some of the stuff I’ve been reading over the last four years, that’s saying something. “After John Dewey, What?” is collected in On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand (Harvard UP: 1962, rev. ed. 1979). I’m using the eighth printing (1997), so clearly the book’s got a considerable audience. I’d like to be among them to hear what they think about this book. I have the funny feeling I sometimes get when I’m immersed in a scholarly or literary author: I want to find the online discussion forum devoted to the author’s work, the fan sites that document all the errata and all the various editions and include multiple interviews with the writer, all the dense, prolific, easily accessed community-of-interest resources I take for granted in other areas (film, IT, consumer electronics, music). I know those materials are there, but they’re scattered, and they’re not flowing into a mighty online conversation. One day that will change.

But I digress.

What I’d like to do is reproduce each paragraph in this essay and follow it with commentary, observations, questions, and a considerable number of amens. If the Talmudic metaphor seems strange, here’s a stranger metaphor still: I’d like to be with this essay the way I’m with the crowd and the musicians at a concert. I’m not even sure what that means, so perhaps I’ll leave the metaphor alone for a more satisfying exegesis at another time. And I’ll leave the bulk of the essay for your reading pleasure.

For now, here are some choice moments in an essay I urge you to read as soon as possible. And once you have, or if you’ve read it already, please tell me what you think.

Bruner begins by quoting from John Dewey’s My Pedagogic Creed, written when Dewey was thirty-eight. Part of the second article of faith caught me by the heart immediately: “Education, therefore, is a process of living, and not a preparation for future living.” I might have that engraved on my tombstone.

Bruner is candid and rigorous about where Dewey fell short, and what in Dewey’s thought responded to a cultural context that is no longer the one we live in, but he’s also scrupulous about recording and probing into what endures, and what we forget at our peril. He responds to Dewey’s warnings about educational sentimentalism, and reminds us that we should not be reluctant “to expose the child to the startling sweep of man and nature for fear it might violate the comfortable domain of his direct experience.” Bruner rejects “the cloying concept of ‘readiness.'” He asks the vital question: “In what form shall we speak our beliefs?”–and goes on to state his own pedagogic creed.

Tonight, I offer two quotations from the first of Bruner’s own five articles of faith.

What education is. Education seeks to develop the power and sensibility of mind. On the one hand, the educational process transmits to the individual some part of the accumulation of knowledge, style, and values that constitutes the culture of a people. In doing so, it shapes the impulses, the consciousness, and the way of life of the individual. But education must also seek to develop the processes of intelligence so that the individual is capable of going beyond the cultural ways of the social world, able to innovate in however modest a way so that he can create an interior culture of his own. For whatever the art, the science, the literature, the history, and the geography of a culture, each man must be his own artist, his own scientist, his own historian, his own navigator. No person is master of the whole culture; indeed, this is almost a defining characteristic of that form of social memory that we speak of as culture. Each man lives a fragment of it. To be whole, he must create his own version of the world, using that part of his cultural heritage he has made his own through education. [Emphasis mine.]

In other words, the goal of a liberal arts education is to enable students to innovate and inquire within their own ongoing liberal arts education, that is, their lives. Bruner beautifully re-views Dewey: “Education … is a process of living, not a preparation for future living.”

The section ends with the paragraph, one that I think should be memorized and recited before, during, and after all discussions of curriculum (my that sounds prescriptive, but I’d like to try the exercise):

Education must begin, as Dewey concluded his first article of belief, “with a psychological insight into the child’s capacities, interests, habits,” but a point of departure is not an itinerary. It is just as mistaken to sacrifice the adult to the child as to sacrifice the child to the adult. It is sentimentalism to assume that the teaching of life can be fitted always to the child’s interests just as it is empty formalism to force the child to parrot the formulas of adult society. Interests can be created and stimulated. In this sphere it is not far from the truth to say that supply creates demand, that the provocation of what is available creates response. One seeks to equip the child with deeper, more gripping, and subtler ways of knowing the world and himself.

Much confusion about what it means to be truly student-centered could be mended by these words.

Bruner goes on to discuss “what the school is,” “the subject matter of education,” “the nature of method,” and “the school and social progress.” Each of those discussions is just as challenging, nuanced, and lucid as the bits I’ve quoted. What Bruner seeks to equip the child with, he has also bequeathed to me. I wish I had discovered this writer a decade ago. I am glad, very glad to be learning from him now.

My thanks also to my colleague Tom Fallace for piquing my curiosity about Dewey, a process that made this Bruner essay all the more resonant. I have so much to learn.