Process of Education, The

Authored by cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education is a report of the Woods Hole Conference of 1959, a watershed event in the history of curriculum studies. This educational classic's stated intent was to discuss new efforts in curriculum design that had been spurred by federal funding in reaction to Russia's success with Sputnik. However, despite the meeting's focus, only three educators attended, the principal participants being scientists, mathematicians, and psychologists. Emphasizing the structures of academic disciplines [Page 687]as the organizing principle for the curriculum, Bruner's interpretation of the conference proceedings quickly became the foundational statement for a new national curriculum reform movement. In effect, the movement represented the transference of responsibility for curriculum development from curriculum professors and K12 educators to scholars in the academic disciplines. As a result, the curriculum field went into crisis, leading to a transformation that has variously been termed its recon-ceptualization or renaissance.

Other consequences of the new reform movement were equally dramatic. As Bruner interpreted the importance of the movement, educational psychologists reasserted a place in curriculum planning that they had deserted earlier in the century for the study of aptitude and achievement. With their focus on the learning process, however, psychologists' foray into curriculum tended to cast educational problems in terms of learning theory. Long-standing curriculum scholarship on the implications of balance among learner needs, societal needs, and subject matter was neglected. In addition, the movement's impetusthe Sputnik crisisprovided a rationale for the federal government to assume broad new responsibilities in education. Congress allocated massive funds for curriculum revisions, especially in math, sciences, and foreign languages. However, control of this money did not fall to curriculum professors, who had been scapegoated along with professional educators as the cause of U.S. technological shortcomings. Rather, much of the money went to discipline-based scholars, who assumed that curriculum could be generated centrally and disseminated to teachers who would be trained to use them. Such curricular efforts were already underway in physics, biology, and chemistry when Woods Hole participants met to compare their efforts and discuss further possibilities.

The conference was organized and financed by the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Office of Education, the Air Force, the National Science Foundation, and the Rand Corporation, with additional support from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Carnegie Corporation. Bruner's summary of the proceedings laid out the hypothesis that any subject could be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any age. The goal of curriculum and instruction was to be intellectual development. The central themes for proceeding in curriculum work were “structure of learning,” “readiness for learning,” and the “spiral curriculum.” The appropriate pedagogy would mimic the investigative strategies of discipline specialists.

Bruner recounted the sense of a profound scientific revolution that the country was experiencing at the time. In 30 years, everyday life had been transformed by the wonders of radio, television, and the automobile. Hopes ran high that education would be substantially transformed now that scientists were involved. This new optimism was premature, however. Scholars within the same discipline did not always agree on its basic structure or that the concept of structure as an organizing principle was valid. Many teachers rejected the new curricula because they were too difficult for the great number of students of average ability or because they challenged traditional pedagogical practices. In addition, in the mid-1960s, politicians began to call for evaluation studies to prove that federally funded programs were accomplishing their goals. The results undermined confidence in programs based on top-down models that ignored teacher input. Writing in 1971, Bruner recalled that discipline-centered reform had made sense framed by the cognitive revolution in psychology and the military and technological emphasis of the cold war. It became clear, however, that the approach erroneously assumed that students lived in a sort of educational vacuum, shielded from larger community and social concerns. In later years, he went on to investigate the role of culture in learning.

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