ABSTRACT
School is the place of disciplined and directed thinking par excellence. One of the major aims of school is to deepen and enhance the student’s understanding of the world, herself included. Towards this aim, school functions are organized around three goals: the transmission of culture-valued knowledge, the development of learning skills, and the cultivation of creative thinking that would make the student a prospective inventor of new knowledge about the world. This is precisely the object of study of the psychology of cognitive development. Since the early days of Piaget, this field has focused on understanding the structure and the dynamics of change of the person’s understanding of the world. In fact, Genetic Epistemology, Piaget’s own academic offspring, intended to enlighten the phylogenesis of knowledge by studying its ontogenesis and vice versa. It is natural, then, that Piagetian theory has appealed to people in education since the 1960s, when it dominated the field of developmental psychology.
