ABSTRACT
One difficulty in writing this book is an ever-present uneasiness caused by the inability to do more than touch on a small range of what constitutes Mythic understanding. And even the topics I touch on, such as stories in the previous chapter, have ramifications that go far beyond what can be encompassed within a single chapter. The choice of topics for discussion is determined by the attempt to bring into prominence certain features of children’s thinking which are not at all contentious but which, perhaps in part, even for that very reason, have not figured prominently in educational discourse and research. What I am doing, then, is more in the way of pointing at some things and then trying to show that they have important educational implications. This is not at all to depreciate the importance of those features of children’s thinking that are enlightened by mainstream educational research, but rather to argue that a balanced picture of the child as thinker and learner needs more appreciation of what I am pointing to as key features of Mythic understanding. Research has, for example, focused in great and ingenious detail on the embryonic forms of rational skills but has not equally enlightened, say, metaphoric capacities. There is no problem at all in enlightening first what our available research methods are good at, but there is a problem when we assume that what is enlightened forms a disproportionate part of the phenomena we are trying to understand.
