Bruner, jerome - the Growth of Mind

7/30/2019 Bruner, jerome - the Growth of Mind

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THE GROWTH OF MIND xJEROME S. BRUNER

Harvard Univers i tyT HESE past several years, I have had thepainful pleasureand it has been bothofexploring two aspects of the cognitive proc-esses that were new to me. One was cognitive de-velopment, the other pedagogy. I knew, as we allknow, that the two were closely related, and it wasmy naive hope that, betimes, the relation wouldcome clear to me. Indeed, 2 years ago when Ifirst knew that in early September 1965 I wouldbe standing here, delivering this lecture, I said tomyself that I would use the occasion to set forthto my colleagues what I had been able to find outabout this vexed subject, the relation of pedagogyand development. It seemed obvious then that in2 years one could get to the heart of the matter.

The 2 years have gone by. I have had theprivilege of addressing this distinguished audience(Bruner, 1964) on some of our findings concerningthe development of cognitive processes in children,and I have similarly set forth what I hope arenot entirely unreasonable ideas about pedagogy(Bruner, in press). I am still in a very deepquandary concerning the relation of these twoenterprises. The heart of the matter still eludes

e, but I shall stand by my resolve. I begin onthis autobiographical note so that you may know indvance why this evening is more an exercise inonjecture than a cataloguing of solid conclusions.What is most unique about man is that his

as an individual depends upon the historyf his speciesnot upon a history reflected in

and chromosomes but, rather, reflected inculture external to man's tissue and wider inis embodied in any one man's compe-

Perforce, then, the growth of mind is al-from the outside. And since

culture, particularly an advanced one, transcendsbounds of individual competence, the limits

r individual growth are by definition greater thanattained.

r the limits of growth depend on how a culture1Address of the President to the Seventy-Third Annualonvention;- of the Am erican Psychological Association,1965.

assists the individual to use such intellectual poten-tial as he may possess. It seems highly unlikelyeither empirically or canonicallythat we haveany realistic sense of the furthest reach of suchassistance to growth.

The evidence today is that the full evolution ofintelligence came as a result of bipedalism andtool using. The large human brain graduallyevolved as a sequel to the first use of pebble toolsby early near-man. To condense the story, a near-man, or hominid, with a slightly superior brain,using a pebble tool, could make out better in theniche provided by nature than a near-man whodepended not on tools but on sheer strength andformidable jaws. Natural selection favored theprimitive tool user. In time, thanks to his betterchance of surviving and breeding, he became moreso: The ones who survived had larger brains, 'smaller jaws, less ferocious teeth. In place ofbelligerent anatomy, they developed tools and abrain that made it possible to use them. Humanevolution thereafter became less a matter of havingappropriate fangs or claws and more one of usingand later fashioning tools to express the powers ofthe larger brain that was also emerging. Withouttools the brain was of little use, no matter howmany hundred cubic centimeters of it there mightbe. Let it also be said that without theoriginal programmatic capacity for fitting toolsinto a sequence of acts, early hominids wouldnever have started the epigenetic progress thatbrought them to their present state. And as humangroups stabilized, tools became more complex and"shaped to pattern," so that it was no longer amatter of reinventing tools in order to survive, butrather of mastering the skills necessary .for usingthem. In short, after a certain point in humanevolution, the only means whereby man could fillhis evolutionary niche was through the culturaltransmission of the skills necessary for the useof priorly invented techniques, implements, anddevices.

Two crucial parallel developments seem also tohave occurred. As hominids became increasinglybipedal, with the freed hands necessary for using1007


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1008 A M E R I C A N P S Y C H O L O G I S Tspontaneous pebble tools, selection also favoredthose with a heavier pelvic bony structure thatcould sustain the impacting strain of bipedal loco-mo tion. The added streng th came, of course, froma gradual closing down of the b irth canal. Thereis an obstetrical paradox here: a creature withan increasingly larger brain but with a smaller andsmaller birth canal to get through. The resolu-tion seems to have been achieved through the im-m atur ity of the hum an neonate, particularly cere-bral immaturity that assures no t only a smallerhead, but also a longer period of transmittingthe necessary skills required by human culture.During this same period, human language musthave emerged, giving man not only a new andpowerful way of representing reality but also in-creasing his power to assist the mental gr ow th ofthe young to a degree beyond anything beforeseen in nature.

It is impossible, of course, to reconstruct theevolution in techniques of instruction in the shadowzone between hominids and man. I have tried tocompensate by observing contemporary analoguesof earlier forms, knowing full well that the pursuitof analogy can be dangerously misleading. I havespent many hours observing uncut films of thebehavior of free-ranging baboons, films shot in EastAfrica by my colleague Irven DeVore with a verygenerous footage devoted to infants and juveniles.I have also had access to the unedited film archivesof a hunting-gathering people living under roughlyanalogous ecological conditions, the IKung Bush-man of the Kalahari, recorded by Laurance andLorna Marshall, brilliantly aided by their sonJohn and daughter Elizabeth.2 I have also workeddirectly but informally with the Wolof of Senegal,observing children in the bush and in French-styleschools. Even more valuable than my own in-formal observations in Senegal were the systematicexperiments carried ou t later by my colleague,Patricia Marks Greenfield (in press).

Let me describe very briefly some salient dif-ferences in the free learning patterns of immaturebaboons and among IKung children. Baboonshave a highly developed social life in their troops,21 am greatly indebted to Irven DeVore an d Educa-tional Services Incorporated for the opportunity to viewhis films of free-ranging baboons, and to Laurance andLorna M arshall for the oppo rtun ity to exam ine their in-comparable archives. DeV ore and the Marshalls have been

generous in their counsel as well.

with well-organized and stable dominance patterns.They live within a territory, protecting themselvesfrom predators by joint action of the stronglybuilt, adult males. It is striking that th e behaviorof baboon juveniles is shaped principally by playwith their peer group, play that provides oppor-tunity for the spontaneous expression and practiceof the component acts that, in maturity, will beorchestrated into either the behavior of the domi-nant male or of the infant- prote ctive female. A llthis seems to be accomplished with little participa-tion by any mature animals in the play of thejuveniles. We know from the important experi-ments of Harlow and his colleagues (Harlow & Har-low, 1962) how devastating a disruption in devel-opment can be produced in subhuman primates byinterfering with their opportunity fo r peer-groupplay and social interaction.

Among hunting-gathering humans, on the otherhand, there is c o ns ta n t interaction between adultand child, or adult and adolescent, or adolescentand child. I K ung adults and children play an ddance together, sit together, participate in minorhunting together, join in song and story tellingtogether. A t very frequently intervals, moreover,children are party to rituals presided over by adultsminor, as in the first haircutting, or major, aswhen a boy kills his first Kudu buck and goesthrough the proud but painful process of scarifica-tion. C hildren, besides, are constantly playing imi-tatively with the rituals, implements, tools, andweapons of the adult world. Young juvenilebaboons, on the other hand, virtually never playwith things or imitate directly large and significantsequences of adult behavior.Note, though, that in tens of thousands of feet

of ! Kung film, one virtually never sees an instanceof "teaching" taking place outside the situationwhere the behavior to be learned is relevant.Nobody "teaches" in our prepared sense of theword. There is nothing like school, nothing likelessons. Indeed, among the IKung children thereis very little "telling." M ost of what we wouldcall instruction is throug h showing. A nd there isno "practice" or "drill" as such save in the formof play modeled directly on adult modelsplayhunting, play bossing, play exchanging, play babytending, play house making. In the end, everyman in the culture knows nearly all there is toknow about how to get on with life as a man, and


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G R O W T H O F MIND 1009woman as a womanthe skills, the rituals

d myths, the obligations and rights.Th e change in the instruction of children in

twofold. First of all,knowledge and skill in the culture far in

of what any one individual knows. And so,there develops an economical tech-of instructing the young based heavily onout of context rather than showing in con-

literate societies, the practice becomesin the school or the "teacher."

promote this necessarily abstract way of in-e young. The result of "teaching the

can, at its worst, lead to the ritual, rotethat has led a generation of critics from

x Wertheimer (1945) to Mary Alice White (un-Teachers' College to despair. For in theched school, what is imparted often has little

with life as lived in the society exceptas the demands of school are of a kind

reflect indirectly the demands of life in aBut these indirectly imposed

may be the most important feature of theFor school is a sharp departure

indigenous practice. It takes learning, as wenoted, out of the context of immediate actionby dint of putting it into a school. This

makes learning become an act infreed from th e immediate ends of action,the learner for the chain of reckoningfrom payoff that is needed for the formula-

of complex ideas. At the same time, the(if successful) frees the child from the pace

of the round of daily activity. If theits own, it may be one of the great agents for

reflectiveness. Moreover, in school, onethe lesson" which means one must

to follow either the abstraction of writtensense that it is divorcedthe concrete situation to which the speech

relatedor the abstrac-language delivered orally but out of theof an ongoing action. Both of these are

of language.It is no wonder, then, that many recent studies

differences between "primitive" chil-re in schools and their brothers who

differences in perception, abstraction,and so on. I need only cite the

work of Biesheuvel (1949) in South Africa, Gayand Cole (undated) in Liberia, Greenfield (in press)in Senegal, Maccoby and Modiano (in press) inrural Mexico, Reich (in press) among AlaskanEskimos.

What a culture does to assist the developmentof the powers of mind of its members is, in effect,to provide amplification systems to which humanbeings, equipped with appropriate skills, can linkthemselves. There are, first, the amplifiers ofactionhammers, levers, digging sticks, wheelsbut more important, the programs of action intowhich such implements can be substituted. Sec-ond, there are amplifiers of the senses, ways oflooking and noticing that can take advantage ofdevices ranging from smoke signals and hailersto diagrams and pictures that stop the action ormicroscopes that enlarge it. Finally and mostpowerfully, there are amplifiers of the thoughtprocesses, ways of thinking that employ languageand formation of explanation, and later us e suchlanguages as mathematics and logic and even findautomatic servants to crank out the consequences.A culture is, then, a deviser, a repository, and atransmitter of amplification systems and of thedevices that fit into such systems. We know verylittle in a deep sense about the transmission func-tion, how people are trained to get the most fromtheir potential by use of a culture's resources.

But it is reasonably clear that there is a majordifference between the mode of transmission in atechnical society, with its schools, and an indigenousone, where cultural transmission is in the contextof action. It is not just that an indigenoussociety, when its action pattern becomes disruptedfalls apartat a most terrifying rateas in un-controlled urbanization in some parts of Africa.Rather, it is that the institution of a school servesto convert knowledge and skill into more symboli-cal, more abstract, more verbal form. It is thisprocess of transmissionadmittedly very new inhuman historythat is so poorly understood andto which, finally, we shall return.

There are certain obvious specifications that canbe stated about how a society must proceed inorder to equip its young. It must convert what isto be knownwhether a skill or a belief systemor a connected body of knowledgeinto a formcapable of being mastered by a beginner. The


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i o i O A M E R I C A N PSYCHOLOGISTmore we know of the process of growth, the betterwe shall be at such conversion. The failure ofmodern man to understand mathematics and sci-ence may be less a matter of stunted abilities thanour failure to understand how to teach such sub-jects. Second, given the limited amount of timeavailable for learning, there must be a due regardfor saving the learner from needless learning.There must be some emphasis placed on economyand transfer and the learning of general rules.A ll societies must (and virtually all do) distinguishthose who are clever from those who are stupidthough few of them generalize this trait across allactivities. Cleverness in a particular activity al-most universally connotes strategy, economy,heuristics, highly generalized skills. A society mustalso place emphasis upon how one derives a courseof action from what one has learned. Indeed, inan indigenous society, it is almost impossible toseparate what on e does from what on e knows.More advanced societies often have not found away of dealing with the separation of knowledgeand actionprobably a result of the emphasis theyplace upon "telling" in their instruc tion. A ll socie-ties must maintain interest among the young in thelearning process, a minor problem when learning isin the context of life and action, but harder whenit becomes more abstracted. A nd finally, and per-haps most obviously, a society must assure that itsnecessary skills an d procedures remain intact fromon e generation to the nextwhich does no t alwayshappen, as witnessed by Easter Islanders, Incas,Aztecs, and Mayas.3

Unfortunately, psychology has not concerned it-self much with any of these five requisites of cul-tural transmissionor at least not much with fourof them. We have too easily assumed that learningis learning is learningthat the early version ofwhat was taught did not matter much, one thing

3 I have purposely left out of the discussion th e problemsof impulse regulation and socialization of motives, topicsthat have received extended t reatment in the voluminousliterature on culture and personality. The omission isdictated by emphasis rather than evaluation. Obviously,the shaping of character by culture is of great importancefor an understanding of our topic as it bears, for example,upon culture-instilled attitudes toward the uses of mind.Since our emphasis is upon human potential and its ampli-fication by culturally patterned instrumental skills, wemention the problem of character formation in passingand in recognition of its importance in a complete treat-ment of the issues under discussion.

being much like another and reducible to a patternof association, to stimulus-response connections, orto our favorite m olecular componentry. We deniedthere was a problem of development beyond thequantitative one of providing more experience, andwith the denial, closed our eyes to the pedagogicalproblem of how to represent knowledge, how to se-quence it, how to embody it in a form appropriateto young learners. We expended more passion onthe part-whole controversy than on what whole orwhat part of it was to be presented first. I shouldexcept Piaget (1954) , Kohler (194 0), and Vyg otsky(1962) from these complaintsall until recentlyunheeded voices.

Our neglect of the economy of learning stems,ironically, from the heritage of Ebbinghaus (1913),who was vastly interested in savings. Our nonsensesyllables, ou r random mazes failed to take into ac-count how we reduce complexity and strangeness tosimplicity and the familiar, how we convert whatwe have learned into rules and procedures, how, tous e Bartlett's (1932) term of over 30 years ago,we turn around on our own schemata to reorganizewhat we have mastered into more manageable form.

Nor have we taken naturally to the issue ofknowledge and action. Its apparent mentalismhas repelled us. Tolman (1951), who bravelymade the distinction, was accused of leaving hisorganisms wrapt in thought. But he recognizedthe problem and if he insisted on the idea thatknowledge might be organized in cognitive maps, itwas in recognition (as a great functionalist) thatorganisms go somewhere on the basis of what theyhave learned. I believe we are getting closer tothe problem of how knowledge affects action andvice versa, and offer in testimony of my convictionthe provocative book by Miller, Galanter, andPribram (1960), Plans a n d t h e Structure of Be-havior .

Where the maintenance of the learner's interestis concerned, I remind you of what my colleagueGordon A llport (194 6) has long warned. We havebeen so concerned with the model of driven behav-ior, with drive reduction and the v i s a t ergo that,again, until recently, we have tended to overlookthe question of what keeps learners interested in theactivity of learning, in the achievement of compe-tence beyond bare necessity and first payoff. Thework of R. W. White (1959) on effectance motiva-tion, of Harlow and his colleagues (Butler, 1954;


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G R O W T H O F MIND 101119S3) on curiosity, and of Heider (1958)

d Festinger (1962) on consistency begins tothe balance. But it is only abeginning.

The invention of antidegradation devices, guaran-will be maintainedis an exception to our oversight. We psy-ts have been up to our ears in it. Our spe-

is the achievement test. But thetest has, in the main, reflected the

believe we know how to determine, though wedevised tests to determine, how pupils

e what they learn to think with later in lifeforis the real issue.

I have tried to examine briefly what a cultureamplifying skills andto a new generation and, even more

how we as psychologists have dealt or faileddeal with the problems. I think the situation is

a sharp increase in interest inconversion problem, the problems of economy

learning, the nature of interest, the relation ofand action. We are, I believe, at a

turning point where, psychology will oncethe design of methods ofbe it through the inven-of a rational technology of toys, of ways of en-

activity of a school, or of devising awhereby we transmit an organized bodyknowledge and skill to a new generation to

their powers of mind.I commented earlier that there was strikingly

knowledge available about the "third way" ofskills of the young: the first being the

y practice of component skills in prehumansocieties, and the third being the ab-

Let me now become highly specific. Let me con-a particular course of study, one given in a

and in a highly qualitative way, evaluating.schools of the kind that exist in WesternThe experience we have had with this

now in its third year, may serve to highlighte kinds of problems and conjectures one en-

in studying how to assist the growth ofin this "third way."

There is a dilemma in describing a course ofstudy. One begins by setting forth the intellectualsubstance of what is to be taught. Yet if such arecounting tempts one to "get across" the subject,.the ingredient of pedagogy is in jeopardy. Fo ronly in a trivial sense is a course designed to "getsomething across," merely to impart information.There are better means to that end than teaching.Unless the learner develops his skills, disciplineshis taste, deepens his view of the world, the "some-thing" that is got across is hardly worth the effortof transmission.

The more "elementary" a course and theyoungerits students, the more serious must be its peda-gogical aim of forming the intellectual powers ofthose whom it serves. It is as important to justifya good mathematics course by the intellectual disci-pline it provides or the honesty it promotes as bythe mathematics it transmits. Indeed, neither canbe accomplished without the other. The content ofthis particular course is man: his nature as a spe-cies, the forces that shaped and continue to shapehis humanity. Three questions recur throughout:

What is human about human beings?How did they get that way?

How can they be made more so?In pursuit of our questions we explore five mat-

ters, each closely associated with the evolution ofman as a species, each defining at once the dis-tinctiveness of man and his potentiality fo r furtherevolution. The five great humanizing forces are,of course, tool making, language, social organiza-tion, the management of man's prolonged child-hood, and man's urge to explain. It has been ourfirst lesson in teaching that no pupil, howevereager, can appreciate the relevance of, say, toolmaking or language in human evolution withoutfirst grasping the fundamental concept of a tool orwhat a language is. These are not self-evidentmatters, even to the expert. So we are involved inteaching no t only the role of tools or language inthe emergence of man, but, as a necessary precon-dition fo r doing so, setting forth th e fundamentalsof linguistics or the theory of tools. And it is asoften the case as not that (as in the case of the"theory of tools") we must solve a formidable in-tellectual problem ourselves in order to be able tohelp our pupils do the same. I should have said atthe outset that the "we" I employ in this context


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1012 AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGISTis no editorial fiction, but rather a group ofanthropologists, zoologists, linguists, theoreticalengineers, artists, designers, camera crews, teachers,children, and psychologists. The project is beingcarried out under my direction at EducationalServices, Incorporated, with grants from the Na-tional Science Foundation and the Ford Founda-tion.

While on e readily singles out five sources ofman's humanization, under no circumstances canthey be put into airtight compartments. Humankinship is distinctively different from primatemating patterns precisely because it is classifica-tory and rests on man's ability to use language.Or, if you will, tool use enhances the division oflabor in a society which in turn affects kinship.So while each domain can be treated as a separateset of ideas, their teaching must make it possiblefor the children to have a sense of their interaction.We have leaned heavily on the use of contrast,highly controlled contrast, to help children achievedetachment from the all too familiar matrix ofsocial life: the contrasts of man versus higherprimates, m an versus prehistoric man, contempo-rary technological man versus "primitive" man, andm an versus child. The primates are principallybaboons, the prehistoric materials mostly from theOlduvai Gorge and Les Eyzies, the "primitive"peoples mostly the Netsilik Eskimos of Pelly Bayand the I K u n g Bushmen. The materials, collectedfor our purposes, are on film, in story, in ethnog-raphy, in pictures and drawings, and principally inideas embodied in exercises.

We have high aspirations. We hope to achievefive goals:1. To give our pupils respect for and cbnfidencein the powers of their ow n minds

2. To give them respect, moreover, for thepowers of thought concerning the human condition,man's plight, and his social life3. To provide them with a set of workable mod-els that make it simpler to analyze the nature ofthe social world in which they live and the condi-tion in which man finds himself

4 . To impart a sense of respect for the capaci-ties and plight of man as a species, for his origins,for his potential, for his humanity

5. To leave the student with a sense of the un-finished business of man's evolution

One last word about the course of study that hasto do with the quality of the ideas, materials, and

artistrya matter that is at once technologicaland intellectual. We have felt that the making ofsuch a curriculum deserved the best talent andtechnique available in the world. Whether artist,ethnographer, film maker, poet, teachernobodywe have asked has refused us. We are obviouslygoing to suffer in testing a Hawthorne effect ofsome magnitude. But then, perhaps it is as wellto live in a permanent state of revolution.

Let me now try to describe some of the majorproblems one encounters in trying to construct acourse of study. I shall not try to translate theproblems into refined theoretical form, fo r they donot as yet merit such translation. They are moredifficulties than problems. I choose them, becausethey are vividly typical of what one encounters insuch enterprises. The course is designed for 10-year-olds in the fifth grade of elementary school,but we have been trying it out as well on the fourthan d sixth grades better to bracket our difficulties.

One special point about these difficulties. Theyare born of trying to achieve an objective and areas much policy bound as theory bound. It is likethe difference between building an economic theoryabout monopolistic practices and constructing poli-cies for controlling monopoly. Let me remind youthat modern economic theory ha s been reformu-lated, refined, and revived by having a season inpolicy. I am convinced that the psychology ofassisted growth, i.e., pedagogy, will have to beforged in the policy crucible of curriculum makingbefore it can reach its full descriptive power astheory. Economics was first through the cycle fromtheory to policy to theory to policy; it is happen-ing now to psychology, anthropology, and sociology.

Now on to the difficulties. The first is whatmight be called th e psychology o f a subject matter.A learned discipline can be conceived as a way ofthinking about certain phenomena. Mathematicsis one way of thinking about order without ref-erence to what is being ordered. The behavioralsciences provide one or perhaps several ways ofthinking about man and his societyabout regu-larities, origins, causes, effects. They are probablyspecial (and suspect) because they permit man tolook at himself from a perspective that is outsidehis own skin and beyond his own preferencesatleast for awhile.

Underlying a discipline's "way of thought," thereis a set of connected, varyingly implicit, generative


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GROWTH O F MIND 1013propositions. In physics and mathematics, mostof the underlying generative propositions like theconservation theorems, or the axioms of geometry,or the associative, distributive, and commutativerules of analysis are by now very explicit indeed.In the behavioral sciences we must be content withmore implicitness. We traffic in inductive propo-sitions: e.g., the different activities of a societyare interconnected such that if you know some-thing about the technological response of a societyto an environment, you will be able to make someshrewd guesses about its myths or about the thingsit values, etc. We use the device of a significantcontrast as in linguistics as when we describe theterritoriality of a baboon troop in order to help usrecognize the system of reciprocal exchange of ahuman group, the former somehow provokingawareness of the latter.

There is nothing more central to a disciplinethan its way of thinking. There is nothing moreimportant in its teaching than to provide the childthe earliest opportunity to learn that way of think-ingthe forms of connection, the attitudes, hopes,jokes, and frustrations that go with it. In a word,the best introduction to a subject is the subjectitself. At the very first breath, the young learnershould, we think, be given the chance to solveproblems, to conjecture, to quarrel as these are doneat the heart of the discipline. But, you will ask,how can this be arranged?

Here again the problem of conversion. Thereexist ways of thinking characteristic of differentstages of development. We are acquainted withInhelder and Piaget's (1958) account of the transi-tion from preoperational, through concrete opera-tional, to propositional thought in the years frompreschool through, say, high school. If you havean eventual pedagogical objective in mind, you cantranslate the way of thought of a discipline into itsPiagetian (or other) equivalent appropriate to agiven level of development and take the child on-ward from there. The Cambridge MathematicsProject of Educational Services, Incorporated, ar-gues that if the child is to master the calculus earlyin his high school years, he should start work early

the idea of limits, the earliest work beingmanipulative, later going on to images and dia-grams, and finally moving on to the more abstractnotation needed for delineating the more preciseidea of limits.

In "Man: A Course of Study," (Bruner, 1965)there are also versions of the subject appropriateto a particular age that can at a later age be givena more powerful rendering. We have tried tochoose topics with this in mind: The analysis ofkinship that begins with children using sticks andblocks and colors and whatnot to represent theirown families, goes on to the conventional kinshipdiagrams by a meandering but, as you can imagine,interesting path, and then can move on to moreformal and powerful componential analysis. So,too, with myth. We begin with the excitement of apowerful myth (like th e Netsilik Nuliajik myth),then have the children construct some myths oftheir own, then examine what a set of Netsilikmyths have in common, which takes us finally toLevi-Strauss's (1963) analysis of contrastive fea-tures in myth construction. A variorum text of amyth or corpus of myths put together b y sixthgraders can be quite an extraordinary document.

This approach to the psychology of a learneddiscipline turns out to illuminate another problemraised earlier: the maintenance of interest. Thereis, in this approach, a reward in understandingthat grows from the subject matter itself. It iseasier to engineer this satisfaction in mathematics,for understanding is so utter in a formal disciplinea balance beam balances or it does not; there-fore there is an equality or there is not. In thebehavioral sciences the payoff in understandingcannot be so obviously and startlingly self-reveal-ing. Yet, one can design exercises in the under-standing of man, tooas when children figure outthe ways in which, given limits of ecology, skills,and materials, Bushmen hunt different animals, an dthen compare their predictions with the real thingon film.

Consider now a second problem: how to stimu-late thought in the setting of a school. We knowfrom experimental studies like those of Bloom andBroder (1950), and of Goodnow and Pettigrew(1955), that there is a striking difference in theacts of a person who thinks that the task beforehim represents a problem to be solved rather thanbeing controlled by random forces. School is aparticular subculture where these matters are con-cerned. By school age, children have come toexpect quite arbitrary and, from their point ofview, meaningless demands to be made upon themby adultsthe result, most likely, of the fact that


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1014 AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGISTadults often fail to recognize the task of conversionnecessary to make their questions have some in-trinsic significance for the child. Children, ofcourse, will try to solve problems if they recognizethem as such. But they are not often either pre-disposed to or skillful in problem finding, in recog-nizing th e hidden conjectural feature in tasks setthem. But we know no w that children in schoolcan quite quickly be led to such problem findingby encouragement and instruction.

The need fo r this instruction and encouragementand its relatively swift success relates, I suspect, towhat psychoanalysts refer to as the guilt-riddenoversuppression of primary process and its publicreplacement by secondary process. Children, likeadults, need reassurance that it is all right to enter-tain and express highly subjective ideas, to treata task as a problem where you invent an answerrather than finding one out there in the book oron the blackboard. With children in elementaryschool, there is often a need to devise emotionallyvivid special games, story-making episodes, orconstruction projects to reestablish in the child'smind his right not only to have his own privateideas but to express them in the public settingof a classroom.

B ut there is another, perhaps more seriousdifficulty: the interference of intrinsic problemsolving by extrinsic. Young children in schoolexpend extraordinary time an d effort figuring outwhat it is that the teacher wantsand usuallycoming to the conclusion that she or he wantstidiness or remembering or to do things at a certaint ime in a certain way. This I refer to as extrinsicproblem solving. There is a great deal of itin school.

There are several quite straightforward ways ofstimulating problem solving. One is to trainteachers to want it and that will come in time.But teachers can be encouraged to like it, interest-ingly enough, by providing them and their childrenwith materials and lessons that permit legitimateproblem solving and permit the teacher to recognizeit. For exercises with such materials create anatmosphere by treating things as instances of whatmight have occurred rather than simply as whatdid occur. Let me illustrate by a concrete instance.A fifth-grade class was working on the organizationof a baboon troopon this particular day, specifi-cally on how they might protect against predators.They saw a brief sequence of film in which six

or seven adult males go forward to intimidateand hold off three cheetahs. The teacher askedwhat the baboons had done to keep the cheetahsoff, and there ensued a lively discussion of howthe dominant adult males, by showing their for-midable mouthful of teeth an d making threaten-ing gestures had turned the trick. A boy raiseda tentative hand and asked whether cheetahsalways attacked together. Yes, though a singlecheetah sometimes followed behind a moving troopand picked off an older, weakened straggler oran unwary, straying juvenile. "Well, what if therewere four cheetahs and two of them attacked frombehind and two from in front. What would thebaboons do then?" The question could have beenanswered empiricallyand the inquiry ended.Cheetahs do not attack that way, and so we do notknow what baboons might do. Fortunately, it wasnot. For the question opens up the deep issuesof what might be and why it is not. Is there anecessary relation between predators and prey thatshare a common ecological niche? Must their en-counters have a "sporting chance" outcome? Itis such conjecture, in this case quite unanswerable,that produces rational, self-consciously problem-finding behavior so crucial to the growth of intel-lectual power. Given the materials, given somebackground and encouragement, teachers like itas much as the students.

I should like to turn now to the personalizationo f knowledge. A generation ago, the progressivemovement urged that knowledge be related to thechild's ow n experience and brought out of the realmof empty abstractions. A good idea was trans-lated into banalities about the home, then thefriendly postman and trashman, then the commu-nity, and so on. It is a poor way to compete withthe child's own dramas and mysteries. A decadeago, my colleague Clyde Kluckhorn (1949) wrotea prize-winning popular book on anthropologywith the entrancing title Mirror for Man. Insome deep way, there is extraordinary power in"that mirror which other civilizations still holdup to us to recognize and study . . . [the] imageof ourselves [L6vi-Strauss, 1965]." The psycho-logical bases of the power are not obvious. Isit as in discrimination learning, where increasingthe degree of contrast helps in the learning of adiscrimination, or as in studies of concept attain-ment where a negative instance demonstrably de-fines the domain of a conceptual rule? Or is it


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G R O W T H OP MIND 1015;sorne primitive identification? All these miss onething that seems to come up frequently in ourinterviews with the children. It is the experienceof discovering kinship and likeness in what at firstseemed bizarre, exotic, and even a little repellant.

" ; Consider two examples, both involving film ofthe Netsilik. In the films, a single nuclear family,Zachary, Marta, and their 4-year-old Alexi, isfollowed through the yearspring sealing, summerfishing at the stone weir, fall caribou hunting, earlywinter fishing through the ice, winter at the bigceremonial igloo. Children report .that at first thethree members of the family look weird and un-couth. In time, they look normal, and eventually,as when Marta finds sticks around which to wrapher braids, the girls speak of how pretty she is.That much is superficial-or so it seems. Butconsider a second episode.

It has to do with Alexi who, with his father'shelp, devises a snare and catches a gull. Thereis a scene /in which he stones the gull to death.Our children watched, horror struck. One girl,Kathy, blurted out, "He's not even human, doingthat-to the seagull." The class was silent. Thenanother girl, Jennine, said quietly: "He's got togrow up to be a hunter. His mother was smilingwhen he was doing that." And then an extendeddiscussion, about how people;have to do things tolearn and even do things to learn how to feelappropriately. "What would you do if you hadto live there? Would you be as smart about get-ting along as they are with what they've got?" saidone boy, going back to the accusation that Alexiwas inhuman to stone the bird.

I am sorry it is so difficult to say it clearly.What I am trying to say is that to personalizeknowledge one does not simply link it to the fami-liar. Rather one makes the familiar an instanceof a more general case and thereby produces aware-ness of it. What the children were learning aboutwas not Seagulls and Eskimos, but about theirow n feelings and preconceptions that, up to then,were too implicit to be recognizable to them.

Consider finally the problem of self-consciousre f lec t i veness . It is an epistemological mysterywhy traditional education has so often emphasizedextensiveness and coverage over intensiveness anddepth. We have already commented on the factthat memorizing was usually perceived by childrenas one of the high-priority tasks but rarely did

children sense an emphasis upon ratiocination witha view toward redefining what had been encoun.tered, reshaping it, reordering it. The cultivationof reflectiveness, or whatever you choose to call it,is one of the great problems one faces in devisingcurriculum. How lead children to discover thepowers and pleasures that await the exercise ofretrospection?

Let me suggest one answer that has grown fromwhat we have done. It is the use of the "organiz-ing conjecture." We have used three such con-jectureswhat is human about human beings, howthey got that way, how they could become more so.They serve two functions, one of them the veryobvious though important one of putting perspec-tive back into the particulars. The second is lessobvious and considerably more surprising. Thequestions often seemed to serve as criteria fordetermining where they were getting, how well theywere understanding, whether anything new wasemerging. Recall Kathy's cry: "He's not humandoing that to the seagull." She was hard at workin her rage on the conjecture what makes humanbeings human.

There, in brief, are four problems that providesome sense of what a psychologist encounters whenhe takes a hand in assisting the growth of mindin children in the special setting of a school. Theproblems look quite different from those we en-counter in formulating classical developmentaltheory with the aid of typical laboratory research.They also look very different from those that onewould find in an indigenous society, describing howchildren picked up skills and knowledge and valuesin the context of action and daily life. We clearlydo not have a theory of the school that is sufficientto the task of running schools-just as we have noadequate theory of toys or of readiness buildingor whatever the jargon is for preparing childrento do a better job the next round. It only ob-scures the issue to urge that some day our classicaltheories of learning will fill the gap. They showno sign of doing so .

I hope that we shall not allow ourselves to beembarrassed by our present ignorance. It has beena long time since we have looked at what is in-volved in imparting knowledge: through the vehicleof the schoolif ever we did look at it squarely.I urge that we delay no longer.


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1016 A M E R I C A N PSYCHOLOGISTB ut I am deeply convinced that the psychologistcannot alone construct a theory of how to assistcognitive development and cannot alone learn howto enrich and amplify the powers of a growing

human m ind. The task belongs to the whole intel-lectual community: the behavioral scientists andthe artists, scientists,, and scholars who are thecustodians of skill, taste, and knowledge in ourculture. Our special task as psychologists is toconvert skills and knowledge to forms and exer-cises that fit growing mindsand it is a taskranging from how to keep children free fromanxiety and how to translate physics for the veryyoung child into a set of playground m aneuversthat, later, the child can turn around upon andconvert into a sense of inertial regularities.

A nd this in turn leads me to a final conjecture,one that has to do with the organization of ourprofession, a matter that has concerned me greatlyduring this past year during which I have hadthe privilege of serving as you r President. Psy-chology is peculiarly prey to parochialism. Leftto our own devices, we tend to construct modelsof a man who is neither a victim of history, atarget of economic forces, or even a working m em-ber of a society. I am still struck by RogerBarker's (1963) ironic truism that the best wayto predict the behavior of a human being is toknow where he is: In a post office he behaves postoffice, at church he behaves church.

Psychology, and you will forgive me if the imageseems a trifle frivolous, thrives on polygamy withher neighb ors. Our marriage with the biologicalsciences has produced a cumulation of ever morepowerful knowledge. So, too, ou r joint under-takings with anthropology and sociology. Joinedtogether with a variety of disciplines, we havemade lasting contributions to the health sciencesand, I judge, will make even greater contributionsnow that the emphasis is shifting to the problemsof alleviating stress and arranging for a commu-nity's m ental health. What I find lacking is analignment that might properly be called the growthsciences. The field of pedagogy is one participantin the growth sciences. Any field of inquiry de-voted to assisting the growth of effective humanbeings, fully empowered with zest, with skill, withknowledge, with taste is surely a candidate forthis sodality. M y friend Philip M orrison once sug-gested to his colleagues at Cornell that his depart-ment of physics grant a doctorate no t only fo r

work in theoretical, experimental, or appliedphysics, but also for work in pedagogical physics.The limits of the growth sciences remain to bedrawn. They surely transcend the behavioralsciences cum pediatrics. It is plain that, if we areto achieve the effectiveness of which we as humanbeings are capable, there will one day have to besuch a field. I hope that we psychologists can earnour way as charter members.

REFERENCESALLPORT, G. Effect: A secondary principle of learning.

Psychological Review, 1946, S3, 335-347.B A R K E R , R. On the nature of the env ironm ent. Journal

o f Social Issues, 1963, 19, 17-38.BARTLETT, F. Remembering. Cam bridge , England: Cam-

bridge Univer . Press, 1932.BIESHEUVEL, S. Ps ycholog ical tests and their applicationto non-European peoples. Yearbook of Education.

London: Evans, 1949. Pp. 87-126.BLOOM, B., & B R O D E R , L. Problem solving processes ofcollege students. Supplemen tary Educat ional Monograph,

No. 73. Chicago: Univer. Chicago Press, 1950.B R U N E R , J. The course of cognitive growth. AmericanPsychologis t , 1964, 19, 1-lS.B R U N E R , J. Man: A course of study. Educat ional Serv-

ices Inc. Quarterly Report, 1965, Spring-Summer, 3-13.B R U N E R , J. Toward a theory of instruction. Cambridge:Harvard Univer . Press, in press.BUTLER, R. A. Incentive conditions which influence visual

exploration. Journal of Exper imen tal Psychology , 1954,48, 19-23.EBBINOHAUS, H. Memory: A contribution to exper imen tal

Psychology. New York: Teachers College, ColumbiaUniversity, 1913.

FESTINGER, L. A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanfo rd:Stanford Univer. Press, 1962.

GAY, J., & COLE, M. Outline of general report on Kpellemathematics project . Stan ford: Stanford University, In-stitute fo r M athem atical Social Studies, und ated.(Mimeo)

G O O D N O W , JACQUELINE, & PETTIGREW, T. Effect of priorpatterns of experience on strategies and learning sets.Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1955, 49, 381-389.

GREENFIELD, PATRICIA M. C ulture and conservation. InJ. Bruner, Rose Olver, & Patricia M. Greenfield (Eds.),Studie s in cogn i t ive growth. New York : Wiley, in press.Ch. 10.

HARLOW, H., & HARLOW, MARGARET. Social deprivation inmonkeys . Scientific American , 1962, November.HARLOW, H. F, Mice, monkeys, men, and motives. Psy-

chological Review, 1953, 60, 23-32.HEIDER, F. Th e psychology of in te rpersonal re la t ions .

New York: Wiley, 1958.INHELDER, BARBEL, & PIAGET, J. Th e growth of logical

thinking. New York: Basic Books, 1958.KLUCKHORN, C . Mirror fo r m a n . N ew York: Whittlesey

House, 1949.


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GROWTH OF MIND 1017KOHLER, W. D y n a m i c s in psychology. New York: Live-

right, 1940.LEVI-STRAUSS, C . The structural study of my th. Struc-tu ra l an thropology. (Trans, by Claire Jacobson & B .

Grundfest Scharpf) N ew York: Bas ic Books, 1963.Pp. 206-231.

LEVI-STRAUSS, C . A nthropology: Its achievements andfuture. Lecture presented at Bicentennial Celebration,Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C ., September1965.

M A C C O B Y , M., & MODIANO, NANCY. On culture and equiva-lence. In J. Bruner, Rose Olver, & Patricia M . Green-field (Eds.), Stud ies in cogni t ive growth. New York:Wiley, in press. C h. 12.

MILLER, G., GALANTER, E., & P R I B R A M , K. Plans and thestructure o f behav ior . N ew York: Holt, 1960.

PIAGET, J. The cons t ruc t ion of rea l i ty in the child. N ewYork: Basic Books, 1954.REICH, LEE. On culture and grouping, In J . B runer, RoseOlver, & Patricia M . Greenfield (Eds,), Stud ies in cog-nitive growth. N ew York: Wiley, in press. Ch. 13.

TOLMAN, E. C ognitive maps in rats and men . Collectedpapers in psychology. Berkeley & Los Angeles : Univer .California Press, 1951. Pp. 241-264.

V Y G O T S K Y , L. Thought a n d language. (Ed. & trans, byEugenia Hanfmann & Gertrude Vakar) N ew York: Wiley,1962.

WERTHEIMER, M . Product ive thinking. N ew York &London: Harper, 1945.WHITE, MARY A. The child's world of learning. TeachersCollege, C olumb ia University, undated, (Mimeo)

WHITE, R. W. Motivation reconsidered: Th e concept ofcompetence. Psychologica l Review, 1959, 66, 297-333.

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Bruner, jerome - the Growth of Mind

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