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In today's presentation,1 I would like to focus on some problems that have been elaborated by pedology in the recent years-the problems of mental development of the child in the process of his education. These are questions of how mental development is related to the child's progress in his school studies.
In the past, these questions were answered in a rather straightforward way, in the same manner as a naive person would respond after discovering an empirically established connection between the mental development of the child and the possibility of educating him. It is well known that education should be attuned to certain stages that the child passes in his mental development. One should not start teaching arithmetic to either a 3- or a 12-year-old child. The best age for teaching arithmetic is approximately between ages 6 and 8 years. An enormous pedagogical experience as well as simple empirical observations, and some older research studies testify that mental development and the process of education are closely connected and should be coordinated.
This connection, however, has been conceived of in a rather simplistic way. If we take stock of studies conducted in the last 10 years in different countries, then it would not be exaggerating to state that there has been a radical change in researchers' views on the relationships between the child's mental development and education.
How do the classics such as Meumann (1914) and Binet (1909) imagine these relationships? They considered development to be the necessary prerequisite of learning. If mental functions (intellectual operations) are not sufficiently mature for a child to start studying this or that subject, then such study is fruitless. Thus, they thought that development should be a precursor of teaching and learning. Education should be based on development and it should use those functions that have already matured, because only under these conditions does education become possible and fruitful. They were afraid, mainly, of starting education prematurely and of teaching the child some subject at a time when he was not yet mature. All researchers' efforts were aimed at identifying the lower threshold of educability (i.e., the earliest age at which the teaching and learning process is possible).
How did they search for such an age? That was done...