Report on The Process of Education

The Process of Education was a landmark text. It had a direct impact on policy formation in the United States and influenced the thinking and orientation of a group of teachers and scholars， Its view of children as active problem-solvers who are ready to explore ‘difficult’ subjects.

There are six parts in The Process of Education：

The first part is introduction. It discusses the concerns about the quality of education and the goals. It introduces the curricula design of primary and secondary schools to design teaching materials which emphasize both the scope of content and the structural system， and it also helps each student to get the best possible intellectual development.

The second one is readiness for learning. Here the argument is that schools have wasted a great deal of people’s time by postponing the teaching of important areas because they are deemed ‘too difficult’.This notion underpins the idea of the spiral curriculum – ‘A curriculum as it develops should revisit this basic ideas repeatedly， building upon them until the student has grasped the full formal apparatus that goes with them’.

The third one is the role of structure in learning and how it may be made central in teaching. The approach taken should be a practical one. ‘The teaching and learning of structure， rather than simply the mastery of facts and techniques， is at the center of the classic problem of transfer… If earlier learning is to render later learning easier， it must do so by providing a general picture in terms of which the relations between things encountered earlier and later are made as clear as possible’ .

Next part talks about intuitive and analytical thinking. Intuition （‘the intellectual technique of arriving and plausible but tentative formulations without going through the analytical steps by which such formulations would be found to be valid or invalid conclusions’ ） is a much neglected but essential feature of productive thinking. Here Bruner notes how experts in different fields appear ‘to leap intuitively into a decision or to a solution to a problem’ .

The fifth part is motives for learning. Jerome Bruner writes， interest in the material to be learned is the best stimulus to learning， rather than such external goals as grades or later competitive advantage’. In an age of increasing spectatorship， ‘motives for learning must be kept from going passive… they must be based as much as possible upon the arousal of interest in what there is be learned， and they must be kept broad and diverse in expression’ ，so it is very important that in designing the curriculum， people should correctly distinguish between the long-term goals they wish to achieve and certain short-term steps to achieve long-term goals.

The last one is teaching aids . Philosophical teaching aids belong to a variety of types， one is a device to replace the experience， the books also play such a role， and the other is to help students master the sub-structure of the phenomenon.

References：

[1][美]布魯纳（J·S· Bruner） 著.教育过程. 文化教育出版社， 1982

[2]施良方.教学理论：课堂教学的原理、策略与研究 修订版.上海：华东师范大学出版社，2008

[3]黄静洁.心理学家、教育学家布鲁纳[J].现代外国哲学社会科学（文摘），1986，第4期

[4]杨念庆.创设物理情境 激发学习动机[J].天津市教科院学报，2011，第3期

[5]https：//baike.so.com/doc/1905964-2016659.html

作者简介：张娇，女，民族：汉，籍贯：四川成都，硕士在读，单位：四川师范大学外国语学院，研究方向：学科教学（英语）。