ing, teacher educators, researchers, and perhaps, parents see the extent to
which our assumptions constrain and confine us and our children. Equally
important--and, I hope, provocative in the most growthful sense of the
word--are the wonderfully different performatory and democratic educa-
tional projects I present.

This book owes its life to the committed and creative educators who have
been so giving to me and have allowed me to give to them. My thanks to:

Barbara Taylor, for the privilege of working with her to shape a develop-
mental learning approach and the school that bears her name, and to the
school's children, learning directors, interns, and parents with whom we
learned--sometimes joyously and sometimes painfully--but always devel-
opmentally;

Gita Vygodskaya for her warmth, insight, and support, and for introduc-
ing me to the rest of her family;

Elena Kravtsova and Gennady Kravtsov, for generously sharing their
marvelous Russian educational project, Golden Key, with me;

Dan and Hanna Greenberg for the wealth of information, experience,
and enthusiasm their 25-year labor of love--the Sudbury Valley
School--has produced; and

Elena Lampert Schepel and Boris Gindis, two Russian-American friends
and colleagues who gave their translation skills, knowledge of Vygotsky, and
much more.

I am grateful for all the cheerful and quality assistance I have had in the
book's production process, especially the valuable research assistance of
Leanne Kumin and Dana Fusco and the editing, copyediting, and word
processing savvy of Phyllis Goldberg, Warren Liebesman, and Kim Svoboda.

I appreciate receiving permission to modify portions of previously and/or
concurrently published works from two publishers: Routledge, for sections
of The End of Knowing: A New Developmental Way of Learning, by Fred Newman
and myself ( 1997); and the Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.,
for a section of Unscientific Psychology: A Cultural-Performatory Approach to
Understanding Human Life, also by Newman and Holzman ( 1996, Praeger,
an imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.).

I greatly appreciate the enthusiastic response by Empire State College
students to my invitations to perform and philosophize with me in the
college classroom. Their collaboration played an important role in the
emergence of my views on learning.

-x-