ABSTRACT
The move from the mythic to the romantic stage may be seen in development of rudimentary but serviceable concepts of "otherness"; concepts of historical time, geographical space, physical regularities, logical relationships, and causality. With the development from the mythic to the romantic stage, the outside world is no longer securely known as extension of inside self, but it is full of strange entities, working by alien laws, unfeeling, vast, mysterious, and threatening. At the romantic stage, students' interest in scale similarly focuses on the extremes, but is constrained by reality. An important characteristic of knowledge that engages students at romantic stage is that it tells them something about what is real and possible. As with the mythic stage, few content restrictions affect what can be taught successfully during the romantic stage. Students at the romantic stage do not require the absolute meaning of the mythic stage, so the story form may be somewhat more diffuse and more sophisticated than before.
