Bruner Says Education Is Challenge Of America's Computerized Future

Jerome S. Bruner, professor of Psychology, showed an overflow crowd in Lowell Lecture Hall last night a glimpse of a future in which "all routine activities could be done by devices." Finding a role for education, he said, is a major challenge to a society with the capicity to provide the routine."

Such a society, in which machines will be able to solve problems, will have to concentrate on training people to find the problems," Bruner said. Machines can also never be programmed for "provision of unpredictable services," such as teaching--"things that increase the richness of human responses."

Bruner took part of last year off from Harvard to teach a fifth grade class, and has written widely on elementary education. "Most of the teaching that I've seen has been a dialogue between the teacher and the kids," he said, and one of the tasks of what he calls a "theory of instruction" is to make participation in this dialogue easier for the teachers.

Often, he explained, "kids in school spend too much time trying to figure out what the teacher wants, and usually decide that she wants neatness or the juice hour." This interferes with the process of learning how to solve problems. "We send a teacher out to do an extraordinarily difficult job, unarmed and without any sense of the right strategy," Bruner said. "We have to give the teacher a sense of what is possible with children."

Bruner called for an end to the "compartmentalizing" of education as a special department of a university. "Education is not a casual thing," he said, and emphasized that the intellectual community has to organize in order to "encode knowledge and skill in a transmittable form. Education is the tool kit of the next generations. It cannot be separated from culture."

Bruner's talk was the first in a series of three lectures on aspects of educational psychology.