Activity 3.2

“There is a native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later age. During the first seven or eight years of childhood the mind is most interested in the sensible properties of material things “(James, 1983, p. 72)

“It is not till adolescence is reached that the mind grows able to take in the more abstract aspects of experience, the hidden similarities and distinction between things, and especially their casual sequences…Later still, not till adolescence is well advanced, does the mind awaken to a systematic interest in abstract human relations… to sociological ideas and to metaphysical abstractions” (James, 1983, p. 73)

While reading the assigned chapters this week, these two excerpts really leapt out at me as tying into Piaget’s developmental periods of cognitive development. Like Piaget, James lays out important developmental stages that a teacher should try to teach to.  While Piaget points towards teaching at developmental levels based on what a student is capable of understanding, James indicates that having a subject “thrust upon him so prematurely that disgust” would be created (James, 1983, p. 73). I took this to point more towards using a student’s primitive interests and then associating other material with that at appropriate developmental time periods, as James discussed in a previous chapter.