Torah Study as Natural Discovery

I originally wrote this post in February 2009, towards the end of my time in graduate school. It was then that I discovered the writings of Jerome Bruner, whose insights into education dovetailed nicely with the revolution in my Torah paradigm from Rabbi Y.S. over the two preceding years. I would eventually go on to write my final paper on the relationship between Bruner and the Rambam. This blog post was the starting point of that train of thought.

Artwork: Natural Order, by Terese Nielsen

Torah Study as Natural Discovery

I am currently taking an amazing class in graduate school called "Curriculum Development" - a subject near and dear to my heart. Thus far, each and every reading and writing assignment has been thought-provoking and enlightening. Today I came across a short essay entitled Structures in Learning, by Jerome S. Bruner, a famous psychologist and educational philosopher. 

I'd like to share an excerpt from this essay because I believe it contains profound insights into the proper approach to education. If you would like to read the full essay (which isn't much longer than the excerpt I've posted), click here. As usual, the emphases in bold are my own.

Structures in Learning - by Jerome S. Bruner 

Every subject has a structure, a rightness, a beauty. It is this structure that provides the underlying simplicity of things, and it is by learning its nature that we come to appreciate the intrinsic meaning of a subject.  

Let me illustrate by reference to geography. Children in the fifth grade of a suburban school were about to study the geography of the Central states as part of a social studies unit. Previous units on the Southeastern states, taught by rote, had proved a bore. Could geography be taught as a rational discipline? Determined to find out, the teachers devised a unit in which students would have to figure out not only where things are located, but why they are there. This involves a sense of the structure of geography.  

The children were given a map of the Central states in which only rivers, large bodies of water, agricultural products, and natural resources were shown. They were not allowed to consult their books. Their task was to find Chicago, "the largest city in the North Central states."  

The argument got under way immediately. One child came up with the idea that Chicago must be on the junction of the three large lakes. No matter that at this point he did not know the names of the lakes - Huron, Superior, and Michigan - his theory was well reasoned. A big city produced a lot of products, and the easiest and most logical way to ship these products is by water.  

But a second child rose immediately to the opposition. A big city needed lots of food, and he placed Chicago where there are corn and hogs - right in the middle of Iowa.  

A third child saw the issue more broadly - recognizing virtues in both previous arguments. He pointed out that large quantities of food can be grown in river valleys. Whether he had learned this from a previous social studies unit or from raising carrot seeds, we shall never know. If you had a river, he reasoned, you had not only food but transportation. He pointed to a spot on the map not far from St. Louis. "There is where Chicago ought to be." Would that graduate students would always do so well! 

Not all the answers were so closely reasoned, though even the wild ones had about them a sense of the necessity involved in a city's location.  

One argued, for example, that all American cities have skyscrapers, which require steel, so he placed Chicago in the middle of the Mesabi Range. At least he was thinking on his own, with a sense of the constraints imposed on the location of cities.  

After forty-five minutes, the children were told they could pull down the "real" wall map (the one with names) and see where Chicago really is. After the map was down, each of the contending parties pointed out how close they had come to being right. Chicago had not been located. But the location of cities was no longer a matter of unthinking chance for this group of children.  

What had the children learned? A way of thinking about geography, a way of dealing with its raw data. They had learned that there is some relationship between the requirements of living and man's habitat. If that is all they got out of their geography lesson, that is plenty. Did they remember which is Lake Huron? Lake Superior? Lake Michigan? Do you?  

Teachers have asked me about "the new curricula" as though they are some special magic potion. They are nothing of the sort. The new curricula, like our little exercise in geography, are based on the fact that knowledge has an internal connectedness, a meaningfulness, and that for facts to be appreciated and understood and remembered, they must be fitted into that internal meaningful context. 

This approach to education did not originate with Bruner, but with Ha'Kadosh Baruch Hu's method of teaching Adam ha'Rishon in Gan Eden: 

"Now, Hashem-Elokim had formed out of the ground every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call each one; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. And the man designated by name all of the cattle and the birds of the sky and every beast of the field" (Bereishis 2:19-20). 

The essence of this method is that it is geared towards the tzelem Elokim - man's natural seeking of insight into the principles of lawfulness underlying the phenomena he observes in his environment. Instead of bombarding children with a barrage of meaningless facts, lifeless formulae, and rote analytical procedures, we must cater to their natural curiosity and intuitive ability to sense order and structure in the phenomena they encounter. Bruner elaborates on this in his explanation of the three virtues of intellectual potency, intrinsic motivation, and techniques of inquiry: 

For the child to develop intellectual potency, he must be encouraged to search out and find regularities and relationships in his environment [read: "to discover lawfulness in his environment, like Adam ha'Rishon"]. To do this, he needs to be armed with the expectancy that there is something for him to find and, once aroused by this expectancy, he must devise his own ways of searching and finding. 

Emphasis on discovery in learning has the effect upon the learner of leading him to be a constructionist - to organize what he encounters in such a manner that he not only discovers regularity and relatedness, but also avoids the kind of informational drift that fails to keep account of how the information will be used.  

In speaking of intrinsic motives for learning (as opposed to extrinsic motives), it must be recognized that much of the problem in leading a child to effective cognitive ability is to free him from the immediate control of environmental punishments and rewards [read: "to release his soul and its faculties from the control of the nefesh ha'bahami (animal-psyche)"].  

For example, studies show that children who seem to be early over-achievers in school are likely to be seekers after the "right way to do it" and that their capacity for transforming their learning into useful thought structures tends to be less than that of children merely achieving at levels predicted by intelligent tests.  

The hypothesis drawn from these studies is that if a child is able to approach learning as a task of discovering something rather than "learning about it" he will tend to find a more personally meaningful reward in his own competency and self-achievement in the subject than he will find in the approval of others.  

There are many ways of coming to the techniques of inquiry, or the heuristics of discovery. One of them is by careful study of the formalization of these techniques in logic, statistics, mathematics, and the like. If a child is going to pursue inquiry as an eventual way of life, particularly in the sciences, formal study is essential. Yet, whoever has taught kindergarten and the early primary grades (periods of intense inquiry) knows that an understanding of the formal aspect of inquiry is not sufficient or always possible.
Children appear to have a series of attitudes and activities they associate with inquiry. Rather than a formal approach to the relevance of variables in their search, they depend on their sense of what things among an ensemble of things "smell right" as being of the proper order of magnitude or scope of severity.  

It is evident then that if children are to learn the working techniques of discovery, they must be afforded the opportunities of problem solving. The more they practice problem solving, the more likely they are to generalize what they learn into a style of inquiry that serves for any kind of task they encounter. It is doubtful that anyone ever improves in the art and technique of inquiry by any other means than engaging in inquiry, or problem solving. 

The question I had when I finished this article is: How can we apply this principle to our own Torah learning? I'm not just talking about chinuch for younger children. I'm talking about me and my own learning! I have found, especially in recent times, that my learning is severely lacking in the quality present in Adam ha'Rishon's learning. My learning has become exceedingly removed from the process of naming phenomena in my real-world environment. The formalistic dimension of Talmud Torah, while absolutely necessary, is supposed to be built upon a solid foundation in real-world naming. Without this foundation, the formal definitions are artificial skeletons which fail to illuminate the life of mitzvos. 

This problem needs a solution, but at the moment I do not have one, nor do I fully understand the multifaceted nature of the problem. However, I have complete faith that our Mesorah contains such a solution. My two best leads are the Rambam and the Pesach Seder. I will keep you posted as the quest continues. For now, let us ponder the problem.

Update: Thank God, in the seven years since I wrote this blog post, my learning and teaching have become more in line with the ideal of natural discovery. There's still a lot to think about here, but improvement is possible!