Today, as I was reading Bruner's The Culture of Education, I came across this impressive paragraph which meant a lot to me. That's why I've decided to share it with you:
I thought I was in for another discussion of the usual but was not it at all. What do we do now, they asked, about teaching Russian history of the last century, including the 75 years of the Communist regime? Teach it as just one big mistake? As Russia hoodwinked by party opportunists in the Kremlin? Or can the past be reconstrued to make sense not only of the past and its tragedies but of how the future could be shaped? "You," one of them said, "have been writing about history and culture as narrative, about the need for constant updating and reconstrual of past narratives. So how do we get a new generation to reflect upon and reconstrue their history? How do we keep from fooling ourselves again?" The discussion went on past midnight- better to have fresh reading, say, of Dostoevski's Notes from the Underground or Gogol's The Inspector, than 'exposing' official histories of "The Revolution"? The next morning I thought, How come we're not asking questions like that? Because we "won"? Should that mask our failures and blindness- not a moment of official mourning for the tense of thousands of oppressed Iraqi civilians killed in desert storm, never mind how just our cause? No public pondering about the richest country in the world generating poverty at a rate second to none? Is that "winning"?
Jerome Bruner
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