ABSTRACT
At the level of learning, Popper portrayed the learner as an active problem-solver, struggling to adapt her understanding of the world in light of experience and criticism. Contrary to theories of learning imagining the young child to be akin to an empty bucket to be filled, via the senses, with information which is then induced and associated to form a regular, ordered framework of knowledge, he asserted that children enter the world with an elaborate system of pre-dispositions to act and select certain features of the environment. Using the analogy of a searchlight, he argued that the learner focuses upon aspects of their experience which may lead her to maintain, modify or even abandon her conceptual framework. This process is somewhat inevitable, but at times parts of the environment - schools, parents, teachers - can cause blocks to learning by enforcing models of teaching that conflict with natural mechanisms, and, by the same account, elements of the child's environment can be manipulated to best facilitate learning and conceptual development.
