Jerome Bruner is an American psychologist whose work is related to that Lev Vygotsky and who has had a big impact on teaching in the United States. A landmark text by Bruner is The Process of Education (1960) which had a direct impact on United States education policies. The book put forward the view that children are active problem solvers and are ready to explore difficult subjects. Bruner stated: “We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.” As such Bruner criticized schools for putting off teaching more difficult areas. Bruner further criticized the motives for learning saying that goals such as grades or later competitive advantage are not as beneficial as the desire to learn the subject matter for its own sake. Bruner believed that education was not a question of committing various facts to mind but rather becoming a part of the process which makes learning possible. Bruner did not leave his criticism at that but went on to write Towards a Theory of Instruction (1966) where he says that a theory of instruction should address four major aspects: 1) predisposition towards learning, (2) the ways in which a body of knowledge can be structured so that it can be most readily grasped by the learner, (3) the most effective sequences in which to present material, and (4) the nature and pacing of rewards and punishments.
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