ABSTRACT
This is an opportunity to look carefully at two entities—constructivism and education—which we are now well used to considering together, but might well seem to be worlds apart. On the one hand we have a complex philosophical approach to the conceptualization of the phenomenological world within the head of the observer; on the other stands a public project which has firm external goals of cognition involving all the paraphernalia of school classrooms, pupils and teachers. Indeed it is quite curious that the science education community has found itself welcoming into the very heart of its deliberations a way of thinking so fundamentally alien to its practice. As we shall see, it happened partly by chance, and partly by the unexpected transformation of a descriptive child-centred study into the bleakest of old-fashioned scepticism.
