ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses what is arguably the first challenge: the need to convince teachers, parents, and policy makers that the agenda has a good chance to succeed. Drawing on developmental psychology, it shows that even very young children know enough about the world they live in to be able to argue and reason about it rather than just rehearsing what their teachers say. The chapter deals with a brief review of how scholars’ views of learning became linked to language. It reviews well-documented evidence that virtually all children, from infancy on, understand fundamental principles of linguistic exchange. The chapter also shows that infants also have a basic understanding of numbers, and some rudimentary physics knowledge. It highlights these two streams of research—the work on dialogic learning that is deeply rooted in education and the work on infants’ intuitive understandings that lies at the intersection of developmental and cognitive psychology—to flow into one river.
