"The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness"
About this Quote
Bruner is smuggling a quiet provocation into the language of virtue. He frames thinking as an economy, where the real currency isn’t certainty but risk: “shrewd guess,” “fertile hypothesis,” “courageous leap.” Each phrase elevates intellectual move-making over intellectual gatekeeping. “Tentative” is doing a lot of work here. He’s not romanticizing wild speculation; he’s defending the disciplined kind of uncertainty that actually produces knowledge.
The second sentence lands like an indictment of schooling’s moral theater. “Guessing is heavily penalized” isn’t just about wrong answers; it’s about how institutions train students to treat not-knowing as shameful. Bruner’s subtext: schools often confuse compliance for rigor. When he notes guessing is “associated somehow with laziness,” he’s pointing to a cultural bias that equates effort with visible procedure: show your work, follow the rubric, don’t deviate. A guess, even an informed one, looks like cheating because it refuses to perform struggle in the approved way.
Context matters: Bruner helped pioneer cognitive psychology and pushed back against behaviorism’s obsession with measurable outputs. This quote fits his larger argument that minds don’t merely absorb facts; they generate models, test them, revise them. Penalizing “leaps” doesn’t just discourage creativity; it sabotages the basic mechanics of learning by treating exploration as a character flaw.
His real target isn’t students who guess. It’s systems that prefer predictability to discovery, and call that preference “standards.”
The second sentence lands like an indictment of schooling’s moral theater. “Guessing is heavily penalized” isn’t just about wrong answers; it’s about how institutions train students to treat not-knowing as shameful. Bruner’s subtext: schools often confuse compliance for rigor. When he notes guessing is “associated somehow with laziness,” he’s pointing to a cultural bias that equates effort with visible procedure: show your work, follow the rubric, don’t deviate. A guess, even an informed one, looks like cheating because it refuses to perform struggle in the approved way.
Context matters: Bruner helped pioneer cognitive psychology and pushed back against behaviorism’s obsession with measurable outputs. This quote fits his larger argument that minds don’t merely absorb facts; they generate models, test them, revise them. Penalizing “leaps” doesn’t just discourage creativity; it sabotages the basic mechanics of learning by treating exploration as a character flaw.
His real target isn’t students who guess. It’s systems that prefer predictability to discovery, and call that preference “standards.”
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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