Beginnings

The way you work with your pupil will depend on any number of factors. For example:

• Age and the child's cognitive development
• Gender
• The pupil's ability to concentrate
• Personalities
• The material you provide

Age and cognitive development are important considerations. Some teachers believe that the younger the pupil, the better. I am not convinced that this is always the case - a twelve year old beginner will generally make much faster progress than a seven year old; a twelve year old's manual dexterity should be better, as should his/her cognitive abilities. It is probably worth examining the development of the child's thought processes to find out why.

How does a child think? How does s/he speak? What are the characteristics of his/her judgement? Such questions have been the centre of child psychology for three-quarters of a century. Up until the enquiries of Jean Piaget, such studies of language and intelligence in the child were for the most part analytical. The different forms, which the abstraction, the acquisition and formation of words and phrases may take in the child, have been described, and a detailed and admittedly useful catalogue of mistakes, errors and confusions of the undeveloped mind has been made. This does not appear to have taught the psychologists everything they wanted to know; for example, how the child thinks and voices an expression in a particular manner; why the child's curiosity is aroused so easily and satisfied with a single answer s/he may be given or may give him/herself; why a child believes in him/herself despite being so obviously controversial to fact and more importantly how this incoherence (for want of a better word) is superseded by the logic of the adult world. The problems were stated but no key to the solution provided.

Thought in a child may be likened to a network of tangled threads that may break at any moment if one tries to untangle them. The main problem seems to be that whilst examining the child's thought process, psychologists applied to it the mould and pattern of the adult mind. The French psychologist Jean Piaget's investigations offered a new concept of the child's mind as he was able to assimilate and extract from those around such as Dewey, Freud, Durkheim, Hall and others, and use those findings in combination with his own to form a new comprehension of child mentality.

Piaget's results indicate that the child's mind works on two different levels that are placed one above the other. By far the most important during the early years are the things accomplished by the child itself - the plane of subjectivity of desires, games and whims. The upper plane is gradually constructed, however, by the environment that presses increasingly upon the child as time passes. This is the plane of objectivity of speech and logical ideas.

Piaget's methods, as he describes them, have been essentially clinical in the sense of a combination of observation and interview from which he has classified the spontaneous conversation of children from the standpoint of logical sophistication. His method was original in that he was not content to record the answers to questions put to the children alone, but rather allowed them to talk of their own accord. Unfortunately, his earlier approach was very loose: for example, his failure to control significant variables made it very difficult to draw the same inferences he has from his data. He has been criticised for failing to standardize his methods, which have varied at times from one subject to another, even in the same study, so that one is expected to accept on faith his findings in lengthy and ponderous discourses, leaving himself and his co-workers vulnerable to misinterpretation.

Piaget viewed intellectual growth as a matter of sequential stages in the maturation of the child's capacity to use increasingly difficult logical operations. He describes the intuitive thinking of the young child, for example, as egocentric and syncretic-egocentric, in that his/her thoughts are self-centred and syncretic - ideas, objects and events are not based on an analysis of their qualities. The young child thinks of individual objects rather than of classes of such having common characteristics. At seven years old, the child does not realise the need to satisfy others as to the validity of his solutions; s/he simply reaches decisions to suit his fancy and accepts them uncritically. S/he is so egocentric that s/he cannot step outside himself to view things objectively; is only when social pressures develop that s/he begins a more objective appraisal.

Piaget categorises the child's thought processes into three main stages of development, each of which he further divides into sub-stages:

The Sensori-Motor Phase

This lasts until the child is approximately eighteen months old. Here s/he reacts to each object based on its physical characteristics; symbolic activity is at a minimum

Concrete Operations

(Up to approximately twelve years). This stage involves a gradual increase in the child's ability to extract concepts from experience and to gain control through anticipation of consequences. It includes three sub-phases:

• A pre-conceptual phase (18 months to 2 years) during which objects gradually take on a symbolic meaning, e.g. a bottle as a source of milk.
• An initiative stage (6 - 8 years) during which the child's concepts become more elaborate and complex. S/he gradually shifts from seeing a tall jar, for example, as containing more sweets than a shorter but wider jar - e.g. s/he equates height with size to a greater appreciation of the conservation of quantity.
• A stage of concrete operations (9-11 years) in which the child remains handicapped in dealing with abstract concepts and prefers concrete objects.