To Raise Man's Potential

The wildfire interest of U.S. educators in a Harvard psychologist named Jerome Bruner began last year when he published a slim book titled The Process of Education (TIME, Sept. 26, 1960). Its bold and challenging hypothesis: "Any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest way to any child at any stage of development."

Bruner's book was a product of his consuming interest, which is "the great question of how you know anything"-in a word, cognition. Now Bruner is co-directing Harvard's new Center for Cognitive Studies, which he and Psychologist George Miller opened a year ago in the house once occupied by Harvard's President (1869-1909) Charles Eliot.

An Unknown Field. How humans think and learn has been investigated enough by teachers and philosophers over 20 or 30 centuries to produce a set of working rules--for example, six is supposedly the right age for children to start school. But scientific study of the functions of the brain--memory, perception, intuition, imagination, conceptualization --has hardly been touched. Less has been learned about learning in humans than about learning in animals: Pavlov's dogs, for example, or the pingpong-playing pigeons that led to the invention of the teaching machine. The hope in organizing a Center for Cognitive Studies is to bring together psychologists, physiologists, philosophers, linguistics experts, and even certain technicians who can offer experience with computers. Then, relying heavily on experiments, they try "to work out a theory of intelligence--the nature of the human mind."

What is clear is that the mind is assaulted by billions of events, objects, people and impressions (including some 7,000,000 discriminable colors). Yet, notes Bruner, "people can handle only a limited amount of information at one time." To make sense in this plight, humans rely chiefly on categorization and hypothesis-making. They group phenomena in terms of common properties--hot, cold, safe or dangerous. In thus categorizing things to arrive at concepts, they move from an "open hypothesis" stage of rejecting inappropriate information to a "closed hypothesis" stage of suddenly deciding "this is it." Especially with children, a basic problem is learning to take more things into account before jumping to conclusions. Such training is one of the main interests of the Center for Cognitive Studies.

The research strategy is to interrupt thought processes and study them in parts. For example, visual perception involves seeing many things simultaneously. Bruner breaks down this process with a gadget called an "ambiguitor," which brings a picture into focus so gradually that a viewer gets trapped into false hypotheses about what he is seeing. Result: embryo techniques for perceiving more astutely. The Center bustles with other odd projects, from teaching quadratic functions to young children to time-lapse photographs of tots drawing (the best way to see how they see). All this is pure research, but out of it may someday come a revolution in U.S. education.

"Act of Discovery." Psychologist Bruner, whose passion is perception, was born blind 46 years ago. He first saw the world at two, when cataracts were removed from his eyes; his thick glasses still make him look perpetually astonished at what he sees. A native New Yorker, Bruner got into psychology by a fluke: Duke University expelled him for cutting compulsory chapel, relented only when his psychology professor (newly arrived from Harvard) pleaded that he was too bright to fire. Bruner spent the rest of his chapel periods in the lab studying intelligence in rats, went on to a Ph.D. at Harvard, wound up as a psychological warfare expert on Eisenhower's staff in Europe.

Back at Harvard, Teacher Bruner got fascinated with the thought processes of children; in one study, for example, he learned that high-value coins look bigger to poor children than to rich children. He plunged into work with emotionally retarded learners, found that their major block was a fear of losing attention if they made any real progress in learning. Bruner got results by ridding them of reliance on external rewards or punishments. Working with normal children, he soon decided that learning is best achieved by freeing the human instinct to synthesize--in sum, by stressing the "act of discovery."

Form on the Unknown. But children have to be taught to discover. One of Bruner's colleagues illustrates the problem with games like Twenty Questions. Premise: "A car had a bad accident. How did it happen? Ask me questions that can only be answered with a yes or no." Young children jump immediately to the "closed stage" of a hypothesis: "Was it a boy in the car and his mother was rushing him to the doctor because he cut his finger and the car went off the road?" The young do not grasp problem-solving as a process of elimination. "Cognitive simplicity is a virtue of maturity," says Bruner. Only as they grow older do they ask "open hypothesis" questions: "Was it night? Was the driver tired? Was it raining?" Then they zero in on the answer.

Bruner suggests that training can change all this. He believes that imposing form on the unknown is not only the point of education but also the most efficient way of learning. "The process and the goal of education are one and the same thing," says Bruner. This kind of learning shuns external pressures, such as being forced to bone up on unrelated facts. The discovery of relationships becomes a game in which success or failure is simply a matter of being on the right or wrong track. And the child best remembers what he him self discovered. Such ideas led Bruner to theorize that "any subject can be taught to any child" if the most basic ideas underlying the subject can be translated into the child's way of seeing things.

Faster Thinking. Still, the Center recognizes and studies the limitations that immaturity puts on learning. According to Switzerland's Jean Piaget, top scholar on the subject, the toddler is an egocentric who understands things only in terms of what he does about them ("A hole is to dig"). A five-year-old cannot grasp the principle of the conservation of quantity; he thinks that a piece of clay becomes "bigger" when it is flattened. The idea of transitivity eludes seven-year-olds, who cannot understand the statement: "A is bigger than B, and B is bigger than C, means that A is bigger than C."

Translating the "structure" of many abstract subjects is thus no simple matter. Nonetheless, Bruner and his colleagues hope to build on Piaget's pioneering research. They feel almost certain that mental development can be speeded, that children can be led from level to level much faster. This year Piaget's associate, Psychologist Barbel Inhelder, is at Harvard to experiment in possible techniques. For example, six-year-olds cannot see several aspects of one phenomenon. They assume that one car is going faster than another because it reaches a goal first. It may really have started closer to the target, and Psychologist Inhelder will use toy cars to demonstrate. "There may be a rule that the exercise of a function leads to its further development," suggests Bruner.

The only certain thing is the rich promise of the task. "When we understand the cognitive processes," says Explorer Bruner, "we will certainly be able to design education that will use man's potential for learning far more effectively than it has been used before."

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