ABSTRACT
If a person is largely ignorant of the world and lacks the conceptual distinctions and categories that only knowledge can provide, that person lacks the means to develop the capacities on whose progressive unfolding educational development depends. By the ironic stage, stories in any of the forms discussed above may be entertaining, but they no longer dominate or determine the way the person makes sense of things. At the mythic stage, nearly every sentence seems worthy of being concluded with an exclamation mark. At the romantic stage, it is used liberally to stress the wonders of the world. The mythic stage ignores the restrictions of reality whenever convenient, proliferating impossible creatures and worlds that never existed; the romantic stage works to confine thought within reality while exploring its limits; the philosophic stage charts the general features of reality in more detail; and the ironic stage explores particulars.
