Children Require Long, Uniterrupted Periods Of Play

At One Time, Many Philosophers Held That Faultless "laws Of Thought" Were Somehow Inherent, A Priori, In The Very Nature Of Mind. This Belief Was Twice Shaken In The Past Century; First When Russell And His Successors Showed How The Logic Men Employ Can Be Defective, And Later When Freud And Piaget Started To Reveal The Tortuous Ways In Which Our Minds Actually Develop.

For The Fundamental Fact Of Human Psychology Is That Society, Instead Of Remaining Almost Entirely Inside The Individual Organism As In The Case Of Animals Prompted By Their Instincts, Becomes Crystallized Almost Entirely Outside The Individuals. In Other Words, Social Rules, As Durkheim Has So Powerfully Shown, Whether They Be Linguistic, Moral, Religious, Or Legal, Etc., Cannot Be Constituted, Transmitted Or Preserved By Means Of An Internal Biological Heredity, But Only Through The External Pressure Exercised By Individuals Upon Each Other.

Much Research In Psychology Has Been More Concerned With How Large Groups Of People Behave Than About The Particular Ways In Which Each Individual Person Thinks... Too Statistical. I Find This Disappointing Because, In My View Of The History Of Psychology, Far More Was Learned, For Example, When Jean Piaget Spent Several Years Observing The Ways That Three Children Developed, Or When Sigmund Freud Took Several Years To Examine The Thinking Of A Rather Small Number Of Patients.

Reflective Abstraction, However, Is Based Not On Individual Actions But On Coordinated Actions.

Education, For Most People, Means Trying To Lead The Child To Resemble The Typical Adult Of His Society . . . But For Me And No One Else, Education Means Making Creators. . . . You Have To Make Inventors, Innovators...not Conformists