Bridging the Cultural Divide in the United States.
Revisiting Jerome Bruner’s The Process of Education.
Making the Strange Familiar and the Familiar Strange.
Burton Weltman
Prologue: Down the Rabbit Hole.
First gain someone’s trust. Then start with some small conventional truths. Move on to a bunch of unconventional half-truths. Finish with a host of enormously wild lies. This is a method commonly used by demagogues, cultists, and conspiracy theorists to gain adherents. Vulnerable people are lured onto a slippery slope that can land them, if their descent is not somehow stopped, in an alternate universe at the bottom of a rabbit hole.
If enough people are seduced in this way, you can end up with one segment of the population living in the real world in which reasoned arguments and verifiable evidence hold sway, and another segment wandering around in a surreal world in which irrational fears and unverifiable rumors run rampant. The result is a cultural divide and social conflict, seemingly without any obvious resolution. Sound familiar?
Introduction: Jerome Bruner’s Quest.
As I am writing this essay in mid-March, 2021, the world is in the midst of a terrible COVID virus pandemic that is primarily spread through person-to-person contact, specifically through respiratory droplets that people exhale when breathing and talking. Over 2.5 million people have so far died world-wide, including over 500,000 in the United States. Vaccines have been developed that will hopefully eliminate the disease in the long run. Meanwhile, the best way to prevent it has been for people to wear face masks that keep respiratory droplets from spreading and to stay at least six feet from people who are not members of their household. These are pretty simple and relatively easy things to do.
Nonetheless, a large portion of the American people don’t do these things either out of negligence and bravado or, even more troubling, because they deny the medical science behind these measures. And many people are refusing to take the vaccines even though they have been scientifically demonstrated to be effective. As a result, although the United States has only about 4% of the world’s population, we have had some 25% of the COVID cases and 20% of the fatalities from the disease. Hundreds of thousands of people have unnecessarily died because of the behavior of these science-deniers.
The negligence and bravado of young people is understandable even if regrettable, but how can it be that a substantial portion of the adult population doesn’t and won’t believe in science? What is it with these people? Are they crazy? Maybe, but maybe they just don’t understand science and scientists. And maybe they have misplaced their trust in demagogues and charlatans who are leading them down a psychological and ideological rabbit hole. This is, unfortunately, not a new or isolated phenomenon.
The COVID Pandemic. Electronic Voting Machines. Global Climate Change. These are just a few of the recent issues that have pitted those who accept science, verifiable evidence and rational arguments against those who don’t and who accept, instead, fantastic ideas and conspiracy theories promoted by demagogues. How can we explain the opposition of so many people to science and rational thinking? How can we bridge the gap between those who trust and those who distrust science, scientists and scientific methods?
The purpose of this essay is to revisit Jerome Bruner’s The Process of Education (hereafter Process) and to recommend his ideas on bridging the cultural divide in the United States, and especially the gap between those who trust in science and those who don’t.[1]
Process was first published in 1960 and almost immediately became an educational classic. It was met with a torrent of superlatives. Hailed at the time as “an epochal book,”[2] it was called “one of the most significant books on education written in this century.”[3] Proclaimed “the most influential bit of educational writing of its time,”[4] it has been cited as “the book most re-read by most teachers”[5] In retrospect, it has been regarded as the “most influential educational proposal in the history of American education,” and it is still widely used and praised by educators today [6]
Process is a wonderful guide to better schooling. If more schools would adopt Bruner’s methods, we would be in a better educational place. But it is also a precis on how to overcome the distrust of science, scientists, learning, and the learned that has historically been widespread in America, and that has provided to the present day an opportunity for demagogues and charlatans to prey upon the public and the Republic. We can learn much from the book about dealing with our present situation.
Bruner was one of the most prominent American psychologists of the twentieth century. He was the founder of the cognitive movement in psychology. Cognitive psychologists focus on how people think and reason, and how they fall into unthinking and unreason. Bruner’s career spanned some eighty years, and he died in 2016 after living and working to the age of one hundred.
Bruner pursued his cognitive theories in a wide variety of fields, from studying Nazi propaganda techniques to working on methods of public polling, fostering early-childhood educational programs (he was a co-founder of Head Start), developing social studies curricula, studying the anthropology of law, and many other fields. The range of his contributions to psychology was enormous. And his movement from one thing to the next was not random, but rather like a spiral in which the next thing was based on the last.[7]
Throughout his long and varied career, Bruner’s underlying and overriding concern – the issue to which he repeatedly recurred – was the causes of cultural divisions between people and how to bridge those divisions. He was especially concerned about the gap between those who trust in the methods of science and those who don’t, and between those who can understand and appreciate the rationality of scientific methods and those who can’t.
Science-denial devolves from both the nature and the history of science. Science is by its nature difficult to fathom. That is the point of science: to try to fathom strange and difficult things. And if it is difficult for scientists, it is more so for laypersons. Scientific language and scientific methods can seem daunting to the non-scientist. To the layperson, science can appear strangely unintelligible and scientists can seem scary. It seems like magic and magicians, full of dark secrets and mysteries – something that seems untrustworthy because it is unintelligible.
Science can seem more alien and confounding than the unreasoning of demagogues. Demagogues are good at telling melodramatic stories, promoting seductively simplistic solutions to complex problems, and touching on things to which their listeners can relate, even when they are pushing nonsense and lies. Scientists have to play by different rules. They have to follow the facts. Their reports have to be balanced and are rarely dramatic. And their solutions to problems tend to be complex and conditional.
The inherent difficulties in appreciating science have been compounded by the rapid pace of scientific and technological change over the last two centuries. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, which began in England in the late eighteenth century, scientific innovations and technological inventions were for the most part few and far between. And they usually had little effect on the politics of the day or on the day-to-day lives of the general public. Children were ordinarily expected to follow in their parents’ footsteps, and were able to do so. Social, economic, scientific and technological changes were generally so slow that most people were not affected by them and many did not even notice the changes. European peasants in the eighteenth century, for example, farmed their land in essentially the same way as peasants in the twelfth century.
This state of things dramatically changed in the nineteenth century. Inventions and scientific innovations abounded. The word “scientist,” meaning a person whose focus is on scientific innovation, was first coined during the 1830’s. The modern sense of the word “inventor,” a person whose focus is on technological invention, was also coined at that time. The rapid rate of change since then has been socially and psychologically disruptive.
As a result, young people can no longer be expected, or even allowed, to act and think like their elders. In fact, most people have to adjust their ways of thinking multiple times during the course of their lives, as scientific and technological developments continually rearrange the world. It is no wonder, then, that there is a large degree of incomprehension and resistance among many people to what they perceive as the disrespect and destruction of what they consider traditional values and established ways of life. This is especially the case with older people who may feel they are being left behind.
Bruner’s work can be seen as a quest to bridge the gap between scientists and the general public, and to make common sense out of the scientific method. His solution to bridging the gap was itself commonsensical, and it is exemplified by Process. The book, while chock full of erudition, is a model of concision and is only ninety readable pages long.
Bruner’s solution to the culture gap was essentially to reverse the direction of the process by which people are commonly indoctrinated into anti-scientific and cultish beliefs. The idea is to first establish trust with people and then incrementally encourage them to adopt scientific ways of thinking about things and adapt to scientific methods of solving problems.
Trust is the crucial first step. As heralds of reason have repeatedly complained since the dawn of rationality, merely refuting the unreason of demagogues is not enough. If you don’t first have people’s trust, they are unlikely to believe your most impeccable reasoning. Whereas if a demagogue has people’s trust, he can blather nonsense and they will be with him. Establishing trust is the first and foremost requirement for helping people to learn anything, including learning how to learn – that is, how to take a rational approach to problems – which Bruner insists is the most important thing of all.[8]
Having established trust, you can then help people to expand their understanding of things and get a better footing in the real world through a process of making the familiar strange and making the strange familiar. This is essentially how we learn almost anything, by questioning some of our own beliefs – making them look strange – and then understanding and accepting new ideas – making the strange seem familiar.
Starting with small conventional ideas that all can understand, you can move up to larger unconventional ideas that are more difficult to understand, such as the methods and findings of science. It is what Bruner calls scaffolding.[9] With patience, you can incrementally build a consensus on approaching problems, on learning how to learn, that bridges the cultural gap. How this process can work is the gist of Process.
Full Disclosure: Bruner was a pro-science liberal and so am I. Like him, my idea of overcoming the cultural divide is for the other side to come over to my side. I think that anti-science people are wrong and wrongheaded, but not necessarily bad. The virulent and violent among them, the racists and fascists, are bad. But that is not the whole of it or of them, and people on my side share responsibility for the cultural division. My purpose, as such, is to try to promote a process that might help bridge the cultural gap between us.
Historical Context: Cultural Conflicts in America.
Cultural divides have existed in most societies since the beginnings of civilization. These divides have taken different forms: political, economic, religious, racial, educational, ideological, and so forth. Sometimes differences have been amicably accommodated, other times they have been socially disruptive. Cultural divides can lead to constructive and cooperative diversity – e pluribus unum – or to destructive and hostile conflicts – the KKK.
The question of whether a cultural divide between the educated classes and the uneducated masses is a good or bad thing has been debated since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks. Is it better to have what might be called a high culture and a cultural elite that rules over the lower-class masses and their mass culture? Or is it better to have a common culture and common education that connects diverse classes and subcultures of a society?
Some, like Plato, promoted a cultural hierarchy in which the learned would rule over the unlearned. Others, like Democritus, promoted a common culture in which all could participate, even if some were more learned in some things than others. The former option is elitist and undemocratic. The latter is liberal and democratic. Bruner opted in favor of the liberal and democratic position, and most of his life’s work was motivated by the problem of how to implement this position.
In recent years in the United States, in addition to other cultural differences and conflicts in our society, there has developed a significant conflict between those who are pro-science and those who are anti-science. By science I mean not only the recognized scientific disciplines, such as physics, chemistry and, especially, biology, which because of the theory of evolution has become a heavily distrusted science among some Biblical fundamentalists, but I also mean what is often more broadly called the scientific method.
The scientific method has been described as a way of approaching problems that requires procedures which ensure the problems have been given a thorough and objective consideration. Objective means that the pros and cons have been considered and that all of the best available evidence and reasonable arguments have been evaluated in reaching a conclusion. The scientific method can take many different specific forms but in general for a method to be considered scientific, it must consist of empirical evidence that is open for all to see and evaluate, reasoned arguments that are open for all to understand and debate, and results that can be replicated for public inspection. It eschews revealed evidence that can’t be empirically verified, conclusions from revered authority that can’t be established by reasoned arguments, and secret methods known only to a sacred few.
Science-denial in the United States, as exemplified by Americans’ approaches to the COVID pandemic, reflects a cultural divide that overlaps with a political divide and that, in turn, largely reflects a geographical divide. In addition to a division between those who trust and distrust science, it is Liberals versus Right Wingers and Blue States versus Red States. Members of both sides of the divide seem to live in cultural and informational bubbles in which they encounter only messages that reinforce their respective positions, with little empathy or understanding of the others’ positions.
It is a cultural crisis that threatens the foundations of our democracy, as we have seen with the presidency of Donald Trump, a would-be dictator who repeatedly disparaged science and reason in favor of prejudice, fear and hatred, and whose supporters recently attacked the United States Congress in an effort to overthrow a democratically conducted election that was definitively shown to be fair by empirical evidence and reasoned arguments.
Historical Context: The Cold War and The Process of Education.
The current cultural crisis is by no means the first in American history. Process came out of a political and cultural crisis that occurred in the United States during the Cold War in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. The political problem was that the Russians had beaten the Americans into space in 1957 with their Sputnik satellite, and the United States seemed to be losing the so-called space race to the Communists.
The blame for this supposed disaster was widely placed on the laxness and lameness of American culture, and specifically on the supposed softness and weakness of our educational system. America was ostensibly not producing enough first-rate scientists to keep up with the Russians. How to remedy this was the heated question of the day.
Many conservatives were in favor of establishing a separate network of public schools that would cater to the best and brightest students who would be culled at an early age from the mass of ordinary students. Admiral Hyman Rickover, for example, argued in his popular book Education and Freedom that “only the massive upgrading of the scholastic standards of our schools will guarantee the future prosperity and freedom of the Republic.”[10] Much like the oligarchy of Guardians that Plato proposed for his ideal Republic, elite students would be segregated from the masses and specially trained for science and leadership. The conservative proposal would have essentially institutionalized the cultural gap in America.
Jerome Bruner opposed the conservative proposal as both undemocratic and ineffectual since it would leave the great majority of people on the outside of scientific and intellectual developments. These people might, as a consequence, fear and oppose new developments that they didn’t understand, and might fear and oppose the elite intellectual class that was producing the new ideas. The conservative proposal would make worse an already dangerous cultural divide and turn it into a culture war.
Bruner wanted, instead, to promote a way in which all students could be educated in the sciences and other intellectual disciplines – “to narrow the gap between ‘advanced’ knowledge and ‘elementary’ knowledge” – and which would produce both cutting-edge scientists and an educated public that would understand and support the sciences.[11]
Toward this end, Bruner convened a gathering of thirty-five leading American educators, psychologists and scientists at Woods Hole, Massachusetts to come up with an alternative to the conservative proposal. Process is that proposal, a proposal that is based on establishing trust in scientists and other scholars, and then having them explain their fields in ways that will improve schools and bridge the cultural gap that divides the country.
In making his proposal. Bruner, who was a master politician, took advantage of the supposed missile gap between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. to address what he thought was an even more important cultural gap in America. He skillfully managed to massage Cold War political concerns in Process while promoting means and methods that go beyond it. And although the missile gap turned out to be a myth that had been contrived for political purposes – ironically, the very sort of unscientific fear-mongering that Bruner wanted to eliminate – the proposals in Process continue to be real and relevant today.
The Threshold Question: Whom do you trust?
Perhaps the most important question that we face in our lives is “Whom do I trust?” Despite the admonitions of self-styled freethinkers for everyone to think for themselves, and claims by erstwhile individualists that they make up their own minds about everything, the fact of the matter is that all of us get the overwhelming majority of our inclinations, information and ideas from others. From “significant others” and “opinion leaders.”
Only the smallest amount of our knowledge is personally gained by ourselves alone. As such, the first question we face when confronted with most problems is whom we are going to trust to help us to our conclusions. The information and ideas we gain from our trusted sources provide the material from which we construct our ideas and make our decisions.
Most people put their trust in significant others who think rationally and who trust in science, and so they themselves end up thinking rationally and trusting science. But some people don’t. And therein lies a main source of conflict about most social and political issues, including the current COVID crisis.
In dealing with COVID, pro-science people trust doctors, scientists and government agencies that deal with infectious diseases. This is a rational response. Anti-science people have tended to trust right-wing demagogues who either deny the seriousness of the crisis or reject the scientific remedies for it. The science-deniers are putting their trust in people who could get them and others killed, and have done so. This split between those who trust experts and those who put their faith in demagogues has occurred in many crises.
The question then becomes how is a person to know who is trustworthy and whom to trust? On what basis should we decide that someone is trustworthy? And how can we reach out to people who have put their faith in untrustworthy sources? Process can help answer those questions.
Although Process deals for the most part with curricular issues and teaching methods, underlying the discussion of these issues is the overriding question of the role and status of teachers. For without trust in their teachers, why and how should students learn from them? The book is effectively an extended argument for elevating the trust-level of teachers by making them practitioners of scientific methods and spokespersons for science. And the strategies that Bruner promotes for evaluating and elevating the trust-level in teachers can be applied to other opinion leaders and be use as a precis on whom to trust.
Three keys to gaining trust from others and to deciding whom to trust can be gleaned from Process.
First, trust should not be founded on personality. You should not expect people to trust you based merely on your personality, and you should not trust someone else based on that person’s personality or personal attributes. Charisma is not a trustworthy basis for trusting anyone. Trustworthy should be defined as being based on the best available evidence and best reasoned arguments, all of it open to public scrutiny and deemed legitimate, that is, the scientific method.
Trust should not be seen as a personal or individual thing but as a collective phenomenon. Trust should depend on a person’s associates and associations, on whom that person trusts and who trusts that person. Trust should be based on a person’s participation in a web of trustworthy people and organizations, each of them supporting and being supported by the others, with trustworthiness defined as the reliance on Trust should be seen as a collaborative phenomenon. Your trust in someone should be supported by others’ trust in them.
In turn, you should expect and encourage people’s trust in you to be warranted by others’ trust in you. People should trust in you based on the web of trust in which you are enmeshed. A web of others who are themselves trustworthy because they are themselves trusted. To the extent that you share a web of trust with other people, you should be able to connect with them and they with you. And trust would be warranted.
A web of trust functions as a filter to eliminate untrustworthy individuals and unreasonable opinions. Individuals and ideas are vetted by the various participants in a web, some being accepted, others rejected, in the search for a reasonable consensus.
That does not mean that there cannot be disagreements among reasonable people. For any important question, there is almost certainly going to be more than one reasonable answer. That is what makes the question important. If every reasonable person agreed on an answer, the question would not be an important one to ask. There will generally be a range of legitimate opinions that are based on the best available evidence and arguments, and people will have to choose among them.
But there are also lots of answers that are just plain wrong. If an opinion turns out to be unsupported by the best available evidence and argument, it can be well-meaning but still wrong. Other opinions can be both wrong and wrongheaded. Opinions that are based on emotional manipulation, disingenuous arguments, and cherry-picked evidence – the demagogues’ stock-in-trade of prejudice, fear, slander, hate and lies. A web of trustworthy sources can help filter out answers that are wrong and that are wrongheaded.
What are called intermediate organizations are particularly important in this vetting process. Intermediate organizations are interest groups that operate between top-level leaders and government, on the one hand, and the general public, on the other. These organizations may perform all sorts of social services, from Little League baseball teams to environmental advocacy groups to political parties, but they also form a safety-net of reasonable public opinion that can catch people before they slide down a slippery slope of demagoguery and irrationality. That is why demagogues and dictators generally seek to eliminate intermediate organizations that stand between them and their target audiences, organizations that can comment on what they say and do, and that might check their efforts to ensnare the public.
For teachers, a web of trust might include other teachers with whom they have worked, scholars they had heard or read, professors with whom they had studied, professional organizations to which they belong, and other sources of ideas and information that students might recognize and that they could consult and verify as legitimate. Citing sources in this way is not an excuse for name-dropping or self-promotion. The purpose is to indicate to students that their teacher is part of a network of learning to which they, too, now belong.
Bruner describes a chain of influence in education and society at large. Teachers function as role models for their students and Bruner insists that they be exemplars of reason “with whom students can identify and compare themselves.” Just as, in turn, the teachers’ professors had been role models of reason for them, and just as cutting-edge scientists and scholars had been role models of learning for the professors. It is a chain of influence.[12]
And this chain of influence goes both ways. The well-informed and well-spoken layperson should serve as a model of plain speaking and common sense understanding for scholars, professors and teachers. Experts and laypeople connect with each other and support each other, back and forth along the intellectual chain. When teachers bring cutting edge ideas into their classes, students participate with them in the educational web of scientists and scholars.[13]
All of us who are not under the spell of a demagogue, or a cultist or totalitarian regime participate in knowledge networks. And most people seem intuitively to know that a web of trust is more reliable than faith in a single person. When asked why they trust someone, most people will respond by citing well-regarded people and institutions as references. For most people, a network of trust might include professional colleagues, religious leaders, community activists, educators, political leaders, friends, neighbors and all sorts of organizations that they share with people in whom they trust and who trust in them.
Second, you should expect people to trust in you, and you should encourage them to do so, based on the fact that you share important values with them. And, in turn, your decision to trust others should be based on shared values. These should be positive values and not merely negatives or things you oppose. The values should reflect areas of general agreement from which you and others can incrementally move toward agreement on specific issues.
Such values might include The Golden Rule if you participate in the Judeo/Christian/Muslim tradition. Or the principle of majority rule with minority rights if you value the democratic tradition. Or patriotism, your love of country and your desire to do what is best for the country. Most Americans share each of these values and so they are usually a good place to start in developing relations of trust and agreement with people on specific issues.
For teachers and their students, shared values might also include the maxim that “Knowledge is power.” If there is one thing that most young people want more than anything else, it is control over their lives and power in the world in which they live. If teachers can convince their students that what they are being taught will give them power, the students will follow them even into the labyrinths of science. Bruner emphasizes that teachers should learn new things along with their students. He insists that “if the teacher is also learning, teaching takes on a whole new quality,” and teachers and students will thereby share in an empowering experience.[14]
Third, you should expect most people’s trust in you to be conditional. In fact, you should insist on it. And you should make your trust in others conditional. Trust should be subject to modification if conditions warrant, particularly if the first two keys (webs of trust and shared values) fail to hold up. Trust is a two-way street. Bruner emphasizes that a key to learning is “to conduct the enterprise jointly, to honor the social relationship that exists between learner and tutor,” and to insist that each party to the relationship holds up their end.[15]
This is a key difference between trusting a trustworthy person and putting your faith in a demagogue, cultist or conspiracy theorist. The propositions of the latter are invariably based on claims that are unverifiable by evidence and unsupported by reasoned argument. They are generally powered by fear and hatred, with shaky quarter-truths becoming weaker half-truths and ending up wild full-blown falsehoods. Putting your faith in these people is a slippery slope proposition. Once you accept their irrational premises, you can be in for a free-fall snared in a net of irrational conclusions.
The rationalizing of demagogues and conspiracy theorists is generally circular, with no way out once you’re in their feedback loops. When their plans and predictions don’t work out as they claimed, they merely invent some non-rational and non-empirical reason for the failure, and insist that their plans and predictions will work out in the future. If, for example, they predicted the end of the world for a particular day and it doesn’t happen, they will invent some unverifiable reason for the postponement of the End. Trusting such people is a losing proposition.
Trustworthy people will insist on verifying their propositions with the best empirical evidence and the best reasoned arguments. If scientists’ propositions don’t pan out, they are supposed to acknowledge their failures and use them as the starting point for new researches. Bruner insists that teachers should apply this standard to themselves. They should tell their students that if what the teachers are saying does not meet standards of verifiability, then the students should not believe what the teachers are saying. And what goes for scientists and teachers should go for everyone else. People should trust in reason and expect to be trusted only if they are reasonable.
These three keys don’t absolutely rule out someone foolishly putting their faith in Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity, but they should help.
The Curriculum: Making the Strange Familiar and the Familiar Strange.
Bruner describes in Process a school curriculum designed to bring students into the world of science and scientific methods. It is a program that could be used by anyone trying to bridge a cultural gap with other people. His curriculum is based on four steps: (1) Finding and focusing on the structure of whatever subject you are dealing with. (2) Formulating the subject so that you reach whomever you are teaching, varying it depending on their age and academic level. (3) Approaching the subject through developing intuition or good guessing in your students. (4) Encouraging interest in the subject, and helping your students to understand and accept novel ideas, through a process of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar.[16]
(1) Structure is the core idea of a subject that ties together its various aspects in a way that makes sense to both experts and novices. It is a summary statement of the subject that indicates complexities that are likely to be understandable only by experts, but also points out main themes of the subject that are understandable by laypersons as well as experts. Structure, Bruner says, is “how things are related.” It is the core of a web of rationality.[17]
Focusing on the structure of a subject makes it more meaningful, manageable, memorable, and, most important, mutual. Structure makes a subject meaningful by connecting things together so that the subject is not a random bunch of facts or ideas but facts and ideas that have some purpose expressed through its structure.
Structure makes a subject manageable in that it organizes related facts and ideas into a network of meaning, connecting them in a way that enables you to move them around and use them. Structure makes a subject memorable in that it provides a hook onto which facts and ideas can be hung, connecting them in a way that make them easier to remember.
Structure makes a subject mutual in that it can be used by experts along with laypersons, and connects experts with laypersons so that they share in common knowledge. Mutuality is a key to overcoming the cultural gap and the anti-science inclinations of some people. Examples of structures might include focusing on the idea of evolution when discussing history, functionalism when discussing biology, democracy when discussing politics, the Golden Rule when discussing ethics.[18]
(2) If you start with the structure of a subject, Bruner insists that you can then teach almost anything to anyone so long as you formulate your discussion in terms that can be understood by that person. The less academically advanced your students, the smaller and slower the steps you would have to take in teaching a complex subject. But you could teach nuclear physics or ethics to a five-year-old if you had the skill, time and patience.[19]
It may not be worth the effort to teach the fine points of nuclear physics or ethics to a five-year-old, but if you were, for example, to posit as a core idea of nuclear physics that atomic and subatomic particles come together and come apart, you could teach five-year-old children about the way in which bigger things are made up of smaller things that come together and come apart. It could be a prelude to later lessons on more complex physics. You could do likewise with the Golden Rule in teaching about ethics.
The idea that anyone can understand anything if it is couched in terms that they can comprehend is a key to overcoming the cultural gap in America and to countering the anti-science and anti-intellectual inclinations of people. The point is to find ways to talk with them as opposed to talking at them or down to them.
(3) If you start with the structure of a subject, Bruner insists that you can teach that subject through discovery and intuition, as opposed to didactic teaching through telling and testing. Helping people to discover things for themselves is a much more effective way of teaching than telling them things. When you tell people things, the things remain yours. Even if they accept the things you have told them, the things are still yours and not theirs. And those things are easily forgotten or overridden by something different they are told by someone else. But when people discover things for themselves, the things become theirs. And they are more likely to accept and remember them.
Didactic teaching is like trying to win an argument. You are unlikely to make progress in overcoming a cultural gap by winning an argument, that is, by overwhelming the other guy with the acuity of your reasoning. Trying to win an argument rarely convinces anyone that you are right. It usually puts people on the defensive and adds resentment of you to their certainty that they are right even if, in fact, you are right.
You need to win people over by helping them to win the argument through adopting your ideas. People will change their minds if they think they have done the changing. Most people need to feel that they are right. The key in this respect is to help people to think that they have themselves discovered the conclusions that you want them to reach. This is not a matter of trickery or disingenuousness. It is a matter of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar, and then trusting in reason and in the reasonableness of people to accept the truth when they see it for themselves.
(4) The admonition to “Make the strange familiar and the familiar strange” was reputedly first used by the poet William Taylor Coleridge in the early nineteenth century as the measure of a good poem. He thought that a good poem should make the familiar strange and the strange familiar for the reader. The maxim was picked up in the later nineteenth century by the philosopher William James as a key to philosophical thinking and the benchmark of a good philosophy. In the early twentieth century, the anthropologist Theodor Kroeber cited it as a key to scientific thinking and the goal of good anthropology. In the mid-twentieth century, it was adopted by Bruner as a key to learning and as the goal of a good school curriculum. To Bruner, it was also a key to good cultural politics.
Making the strange familiar and the familiar strange is a method of questioning conventional wisdom, shaking up routine thinking, and taking people out of their habitual responses. It is a way of encouraging people to see that what they take for granted as inevitable and permanent is actually conditional and a matter of choice. In turn, it encourages them to see what they think of as alien and off-putting as actually being related to what they think of as good. It is a way of seeing what different peoples have in common and how their differences can be a means of making connections as well as distinctions.
Bruner couples this idea with his concept of a spiral curriculum. Demagogues encourage circular thinking in which a feedback loop of lies comes to seem like truth from sheer repetition. Spiral thinking is a process of repeatedly returning to the same idea but at a higher level of reasoning and evidence. Having encountered a problem and come to a resolution of it – that is, having made the strange familiar – you then question your resolution – thereby making the familiar strange once more. It is a dialectic in which you continuously raise your level of understanding.[20]
Making the strange familiar and the familiar strange succeeds more often if it is undertaken as an incremental process, and not as a revelation or revolution. Increments should be large enough to challenge people to see things differently but not so large as to be indigestible. That is, try in small steps to help people question their own beliefs, starting around the edges and working their way to the center. And try in small steps to help them to understand the merits of other people’s beliefs, to see that those who are different are not necessarily bad. This is not easy or likely to succeed with people who have gone down a rabbit hole as deep as flat-earthers or QAnonists. That’s the importance of catching people before they go down those rabbit holes.
For example, one might start a discussion about poverty and social welfare programs with the fact that during the Middle Ages in Europe it was Catholic Church doctrine that if a poor beggar was refused alms from a rich man, the beggar had the right to rob the man. Giving alms to the poor was regarded by the Church as an obligation of the rich. If the rich man refused to share his wealth with the poor, he forfeited his right to the wealth. And the beggar had the right to enforce the obligation by robbing him.
This was a right that was rarely acknowledged by rich people, and beggars who tried to execute that right were likely to be executed themselves. But the example is a way of looking at theft, poverty, and social obligations in a new way. Having used this example in my own teaching, I can affirm that at the end of spirited discussions almost all of my students ended up agreeing with the Church doctrine.
That example can be followed up by asking whether the children of poor parents should go hungry and what should be done about the fact that some twenty percent of American children go hungry each year. Very few of my students had been in that situation. Their parents had always been able to provide food for them.
These questions pushed students toward thinking about poverty and parents, asking them to think about what if their own parents had been poor and they themselves had been hungry. Making the issue personal brought it home to them. Wouldn’t they have wanted and warranted help from the government? This is another example of making the familiar strange and making the strange familiar. I would bring up evidence of the effects of malnutrition on children, and the long-lasting costs to society of people growing up and living in poverty, trying thereby to bring science into the discussion.
Again, after spirited discussions about the responsibilities of parents, the needs of innocent children, and the obligations of society, almost all of my students ended up favoring government welfare programs to aid children. And most of them also then favored welfare programs for the children’s parents on the grounds that the children needed healthy parents and couldn’t thrive with hungry parents.
These results are consistent with public opinion polling over the last hundred years which show that when Americans are asked broad questions about whether they favor or oppose social welfare programs, some two-thirds oppose them. But when they are asked more specific questions about whether the government should help feed hungry people, some two-thirds approve of the programs.
When Americans are asked broad ideological questions, and when political campaigns are based on broad ideological statements or demagogical claims, most people have a right-wing reaction. But when Americans are asked concrete and personal questions, and when campaigns are based around specific social problems and concrete social programs, most people will consider the evidence that supports those programs and will tend toward a liberal response.
This response is consistent with Bruner’s analysis of the cultural divide in America and his proposed solutions to the problem. You can, he insists, relate anything to anybody if you couch it in terms that they can comprehend. Demagogues know this and exploit it when they couch their lies in fearmongering terms that touch the fears of their audiences. Bruner’s quest is for means and methods of reaching people with science and reason, to touch their pragmatic reason and their humanitarian goals.
The Moral of the Story: Treating Strangers as Family and Family as Strangers.
There is a moral aspect to the method of making the strange familiar and the familiar strange that is useful in bridging the cultural gap. The Golden Rule is an admonition that, in one form or another, is part of almost every human system of morality. It requires us to treat our neighbors as we would like to be treated by them, and as they might like to be treated by us. In turn, it requires us to treat our neighbors as we treat ourselves, and to treat ourselves as we treat our neighbors. It is a reciprocal obligation to treat ourselves and our neighbors with respect and consideration.
I suggest that the maxim of making the strange familiar and the familiar strange can be translated into the admonition to “Treat strangers like family and family like strangers.” In this translation, the maxim functions as a version of the Golden Rule that requires us to love our neighbors as extensions of ourselves. It is a curricular axiom that functions also as an ethical postulate.
The maxim requires us to look at ourselves from the outside, from a visiting Martian’s point of view – that is, making yourself strange – and then to look at others from a point of view inside them – making them familiar. The maxim thereby becomes a way to overcome human divides of all sorts – cultural, political, economic, and social. It is a way of combining practical strategies for solving social problems with ideal goals, which is ultimately the moral of Bruner’s story about the process of education.
B.W. 3/21
[1] Jerome Bruner. The Process of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1977.
[2] G.J. Sullivan. “The Natural Approach to Learning.” The Commonweal, 74. 1961, p.334.
[3].R. Sylvester. “Bruner: New Light onthe Educational Process. The Instructor,79. 1969, p.89.
4 A. Foshay. “How Fare the Disciplines?” Phi Delta Kappan. 1970, p.349.
[5] Richard Jones. Fantasy and Feeling in Education. New York: New York University Press. 1968, p.4.
[6] D. Jenness, Making Sense of Social Studies. New York: MacMillan Pub. Co. 1990. p129.
[7] For a review and evaluation of Bruner’s career up to the turn of the twenty-first century, I have written an essay “The Message and the Medium: The Roots/Routes of Jerome Bruner’s Postmodernism” which was published in Theory and Research in Social Education, Vol.27, Number 2, Spring, 1999.
[8] Bruner. Ibid. P.6.
[9] Bruner. Ibid. P.25.
[10] Hyman Rickover. Education and Freedom. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. 1959
[11] Bruner. Ibid. P.26.
[12] Bruner. Ibid. P.90.
[13] Bruner. Ibid. Pp.3, 6, 90.
[15] Bruner. Ibid. P.XIV.
[16] Bruner. Ibid. Pp.11-14.
[17] Bruner. Ibid. P.6.
[18] Bruner. Ibid. P.28, 31.
[19] Bruner. Ibid. P.47
[20] Bruner. Ibid. P.52.
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