Discuss the impact of culture and schooling on the development of concrete operational thought

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answer: In village societies, conservation is often delayed. Among the Hausa of Nigeria, who live in small agricultural settlements and rarely send their children to school, even basic conservation tasks—number, length, and liquid—are not understood until age 11 or later. This suggests that participating in relevant everyday activities helps children master conservation and other Piagetian problems. Western children, for example, think of fairness in terms of equal distribution—a value emphasized in their culture. They frequently divide materials, such as Halloween treats or lemonade, equally among their friends. Because they often see the same quantity arranged in different ways, they grasp conservation early. The experience of going to school promotes mastery of Piagetian tasks. When children of the same age are tested, those who have been in school longer do better on transitive inference problems. Opportunities to seriate objects, to learn about order relations, and to remember the parts of complex problems are probably responsible. Yet certain informal nonschool experiences can also foster operational thought. Around age 7 to 8, Zinacanteco Indian girls of southern Mexico, who learn to weave elaborately designed fabrics as an alternative to schooling, engage in mental transformations to figure out how a warp strung on a loom will turn out as woven cloth—reasoning expected at the concrete operational stage. North American children of the same age, who do much better than Zinacanteco children on Piagetian tasks, have great difficulty with these weaving problems. On the basis of such findings, some investigators have concluded that the forms of logic required by Piagetian tasks are heavily influenced by training, context, and cultural conditions.