Volume 6, Number 6 · April 14, 1966
A Little Learning
By John Holt
Toward a Theory of Instruction
by Jerome Bruner
Harvard, 176 pp., $3.95
It would be a pleasure to be able to praise unreservedly this latest work of Professor Bruner. He is a humane, perceptive, and intelligent man, who likes children and is deeply concerned with their thinking and learning. In the controversies that divide education, his head and his heart are very often in the right place. He has arrived at some important understandings about teaching, which he here sets forth. How easy it would be to join the chorus of worshipful critics who are or soon will be calling this book great, challenging, revolutionary, destined to change the course of American education, and so on. But it is not a very good book, certainly not a tenth as good a book as a man with Bruner's insights, talents, and opportunities ought to have written. This is not to say that he ought to have written an entirely different book; only that he ought to have written this one better.
Review, 3898 words
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