Bruner and Hirsch on Education

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how both Jerome Bruner and E.D. Hirsch, Jr. have made significant contributions to the public discourse surrounding education. It looks at how Bruner's "The Process of Education", first published in the 1960s has greatly influenced the development of today's curriculum, and how, in his book, "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know". Hirsch argues that the current curriculum fails to provide today's students with the cultural literacy that they need to communicate effectively. It summarizes and analyzes the contribution of both of these authors and their respective works in relation to the field of educational curriculum development.

From the Paper:

"Bruner notes that when students understand the structure of a subject, they can then relate this information to a large number of other things that may seem unrelated. He uses the structural concept of tropism in biology to make this point. Tropism is simply the involuntary tendency of an organism to orient toward or away from external stimuli. He notes that tropism occurs when the swarm density of locusts is related to temperature, and the movement of insects to different altitudes is related to their preferred oxygen content (thus preventing cross breeding). As such, he notes that understanding the fundamental concept of tropism allows students to understand a large number of phenomena within the biological realm."

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