ABSTRACT
The last chapter examined some conceptual frameworks for understanding the development of children's knowledge and feelings about people and places but gave little idea of the extent and variety of their mental geography. This chapter attempts to give a richer flavour of the construals that children have into the wider world and identifies what appear to be some consensus views of particular places. In attempting to understand these images, we need to consider the issues of stereotyping and prejudice. This involves us in a consideration of that alternative model of childhood thinking - that of the child as a processor of incoming information about the world. But first, using the analogy of a voyage of exploration and discovery, we need to map out the extent of the young child's 'known world'.
