what has created renewed interest in the piaget stages of development?”
In the first part of this series I presented Ken Wilber’s view that all exteriors are “material” and that all exterior development is the layered complexification of matter in sensori-motor space. Ken sees the Right Hand exterior quadrants of behavioural and social development as a Flatland of “surfaces” that can be “registered with the senses” and which is “all empiricism, all monological gaze, all behaviourism, all shiny surfaces and monochrome objects” and which contain “no depth”. As Ken puts it, “the Right-Hand quadrants are all material”. By way of summary I present again Wilber’s diagrammatic representation of the exteriors. In the sections that follow I investigate some alternative views of the behavioural and social exteriors. Views that, while recognising the reality of interiors and subjective consciousness, nonetheless provide very different understandings of the Right Hand quadrants and the part that they play in human development. In contrast to Wilber’s interpretation of
Definitions of stages of growth in childhood come from many sources. Theorists such as Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Erik Erikson have provided ways to understand development, and recent research has provided important information regarding the nature of development. In addition, stages of childhood are defined culturally by the social institutions, customs, and laws that make up a society. For example, while researchers and professionals usually define the period of early childhood as birth to eight years of age, others in the United States might consider age five a better end point because it coincides with entry into the cultural practice of formal schooling. There are three broad stages of development: early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence. The definitions of these stages are organized around the primary tasks of development in each stage, though the boundaries of these stages are malleable. Society’s ideas about childhood shift over time, and resea
