Social Change and Equilibration of Cognitive Structures: The Role of Schooling and Urbanisation

Abstract

Two different strategies of cognitive development are proposed. Sevento thirteen-year-old Senegalese children who do not attend school are argued to have a mode of thinking which emphasises "pseudo-empirical abstraction", whereas schooling would encourage a more operational way of thinking which emphasises "reflective abstraction". For school children the acquisition of the different physical quantities is dissociated and gradual, hence the emergence of horizontal decalage. For unschooled children the differentiation of these notions does not appear to depend on generalisation of the conservation of quantity of matter to the areas of weight and volume; there seems to occur a simultaneous differentiation and finally isomorphism between the mechanisms responsible for these different conservations.