Volume 44, Number 6 · April 10, 1997
Learning With Bruner
By Clifford Geertz
The Culture of Education
by Jerome Bruner
Harvard University Press, 224 pp., $24.95
What does one say when one says 'psychology': James, Wundt, Binet, or Pavlov? Freud, Lashley, Skinner, or Vygotsky? Köhler, Lewin, Lévy-Bruhl, Bateson? Chomsky or Piaget? Daniel Dennett or Oliver Sacks? Herbert Simon? Since it got truly launched as a discipline and a profession in the last half of the nineteenth century, mainly by Germans, the self-proclaimed 'science of the mind' has not just been troubled with a proliferation of theories, methods, arguments, and techniques. That was only to be expected. It has also been driven in wildly different directions by wildly different notions of what it is, as we say, 'about'—what sort of knowledge, of what sort of reality, to what sort of end, it is supposed to produce. From the outside, at least, it does not look like a single field, divided into schools and specialties in the usual way. It looks like an assortment of disparate and disconnected inquiries classed together because they all make reference in some way or other to something or other called 'mental functioning.' Dozens of characters in search of a play.
Review, 3646 words
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