Prevailing conceptions of young children's mental life represent children's thinking as confused and lacking western rationality. Instead, we should consider their mental life as a positive oral culture, and evolve a new science of early childhood education based on understanding of peoples in oral cultures. (MSE)

Suggests that educators will increase learning if they base curriculum on children's thinking patterns. Discusses prominent characteristics of young children's thinking and selection of content appropriate to these thinking patterns. (DB)

Argues that the arts are basic to educational development, as they provide the tools and skills that are central to early language development including story, metaphor, rhyme and rhythm, binary structuring and mediation, image formation from words, affective abstraction, and others that underlie more complex learning. (Author)

Many social studies curricula are based on John Dewey's principle that education should start from what the child knows and work outward from there. This paper suggests that social studies educators will make the pursuit of social studies knowledge more interesting if they tailor curriculum content to students' developing cognition. A three stage…

In this article, Kieran Egan contests the scientific foundations of Piaget's developmental theories and the scientific basis of much educational research. In so doing, he pushes researchers and practitioners alike to rethink the centrality of Piaget's tenets to teaching and learning. Egan traces the history of the developmental literature that…

Education, as a rational business, has largely ignored children's fantasies. Rather than dismissing fantasy, as both traditional and progressive educators have, the educational task is to begin the process of linking to the real world those basic concepts which make fantasy so engaging and meaningful to children. (IS)