The 18 best quotes by psychologist Jerome Bruner.

Thoughts on learning, school and human cognition.

Jerome Bruner will always be remembered for being the driving force behind the Cognitive Revolution.. This psychologist, born in the United States in 1915 and died in 2016, was one of the leading figures of behavioral science in the twentieth century.

A Harvard Ph.D., he traced a line of research that opposed head-on the behaviorist theses of B.F. Skinner, John B. Watson and others, developing his cognitive theory.

• Biography of Jerome Bruner

Phrases and thoughts of Jerome Bruner

Heavily inspired by the works of Jean Piaget, Bruner also theorized about human learning, creating his theory of learning models.

In this article we will learn a little more about Jerome Bruner through several famous quotes and phrases that will allow us to approach the work of this phenomenal researcher.

1. It is easier for you to activate your feelings than for them to make you take action.

The directionality of feelings and their influence on our daily lives.

2. Education should not only be a transmission of culture, but also a provider of alternative worldviews and a strengthener of the will to explore them.

Critical thinking is one of the fundamental keys to learning. Without exploration there is no reflection.

3. "We must prevent students from becoming bored in schools".

In an interesting interview Bruner gave to El País, the North American psychologist explained several keys to how schools should teach students to love knowledge.

I believe in a school that not only teaches children what we know about the world, but also teaches them to think about the possibilities.

An education based on utopia, creativity and progress.

5. Do children learn religion? I have a very Anglo-Saxon mentality, I believe in the separation of Church and State.

On secularism in schools. His vision is clear and meridian.

6. Here as elsewhere, besides debate, education needs funding. It needs investment.

A realistic statement about education in the 21st century.

7. The essence of creativity is to use the knowledge we already have to try to go one step further.

On his conception of creativity.

8. Students should be encouraged to discover the world and relationships for themselves.

Apprenticeship and laissez-faire as the key to empowering each child's pristine curiosity.

9. We are "storytelling" beings, and already as children we acquire a language to explain these stories that we carry within us.

An interesting insight into why human beings communicate with a high degree of complexity, through language.

10. "Thinking about thinking" has to be the main ingredient for any empowering educational practice.

Metacognition teaches us to evaluate our thoughts and access higher levels of wisdom.

11. Learning is a process, not a product.

We never stop learning and reformulating our thoughts through sensory and psychic experience.

12. A child tackling a new problem is like a scientist investigating at the edge of his natural field of study.

Outside the cognitive comfort zone we are all driven to find new and better ways of approaching problems and solving unknowns. and solve the unknowns.

13. Fish will be the last to discover the water.

An idea that brings us back to the idea of ubiquity: what surrounds us, sometimes, is precisely what goes unnoticed.

14. Good teachers always work at the limit of their students' competencies.

Stimulating new competencies and skills is based on this principle described in this sentence by Jerome Bruner.

15. Understanding something in one way does not make it impossible to understand it in other ways.

It may sound like a truism, but Jerome Bruner reminds us that reality does not have only one reading.

16. The main characteristic of play (in both adults and children) is not the content but the mode. In other words, play is a way of approaching an activity, not the activity itself.

A thought by Jerome Bruner that can give us food for thought.

17. Knowledge is only useful when it is transformed into concrete habits.

If knowledge is not transported to daily activity, it is of little use.

18. There is a universal truth about human cognition: the ability to cope with knowledge is exceeded by the potential knowledge that remains in our environment. To cope with this diversity, human perception, memory and cognitive processes are governed by strategies that protect our limited capacity so that we are not overwhelmed by thousands of stimuli provided by the environment.

We tend to perceive things in a systematic and prototypical way: this helps us to understand and generalize, and thus to survive in a highly complex world.