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 his 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, using that part of his cultural heritage

he has made his own through education."

On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand Jerome Bruner

more from Bruner

Cartoon on this page by a former student, Easy D. Thanks, Easy!