ABSTRACT
The four chapters in this section are about what children learn from other people and how they learn it. This is a particularly appropriate question to pose in a book that attempts to bridge the gap between Francophone developmental psychologists and others in the field. In the past, Francophone psychologists and their colleagues in other countries used to think quite differently from each other about these issues. The Francophone approach, dominated by Piaget, stressed the idea that children learn for themselves on the basis of their informal experiences in the environment. Although some of these experiences certainly involve interactions with other people, nothing in their intellectual development is the result of direct instruction from other people. Children construct their own intellectual development; it is not constructed for them.
