35 Quotes by Jerome S. Bruner

It is sentimentalism to assume that the teaching of life can always be fitted 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.

Agency presupposes choice.

We cannot, even given our most imaginative efforts, construct a concept of Self that does not impute some causal influence of prior mental states on later ones.

We need to conceive of ourselves as “agents” impelled by self-generated intentions.

There is a deep question whether the possible meanings that emerge from an effort to explain the experience of art may not mask the real meanings of a work of art.

We are only now on the threshold of knowing the range of the educability of man-the perfectibility of man. We have never addressed ourselves to this problem before.

Whoever reflects recognizes that there are empty and lonely spaces between one’s experiences.

Perhaps the most basic thing that can be said about human memory, after a century of intensive research, is that unless a detail is placed into a structured pattern, it is rapidly forgotten. Detailed material is conserved in memory by the use of simplified ways of representing it.