biased and methodologically flawed. ¹ According to the dominant psychol-
ogy, human development is purported to have the following characteristics:
it happens to individuals; it is an evolutionary, hierarchical, and essentially
internal process; it evolves in a sequence of stages; it encompasses the
emergence of the individuated self and the formation of identity through
the interplay of attachment and separation; and it is neatly and meaningfully
divisible into cognitive, physical, emotional, social, and other component
parts. Maybe we have gotten it wrong all these years, some of us think.
Maybe this model of human development, based on Western modes of
thought (ancient philosophy and modern science), retains their dualistic
presuppositions, especially the presupposition of an inner world and an outer
reality. Maybe human beings are of such a qualitatively different nature from
everything else that the methods of inquiry useful for the analysis of physical
phenomena are inappropriate for the study of the human--social realm.
Maybe development is mere ideology--a socially constructed myth and
pseudoscientific term rather than something that actually occurs.

Alternatively, perhaps development is real enough--not as something
that happens in or to the individual, but as ongoing, continuously emergent,
social-cultural, relational activity that people themselves create. Perhaps
we have unwittingly been confusing the map (development according to
psychology) with what it supposedly maps (the life activity of human beings).
Delineating the problems with psychology's conception of human develop-
ment and attempting to formulate a relational, activistic alternative is, in
my view, one of the most potent of the current challenges posed to the
paradigm of scientific psychology by critical and postmodern approaches. In
chapters 1 and 2, I use these sources to examine the history and methodology
of psychology's construction of development, learning, childhood, and other
conceptions relevant to the role and functions of schooling. Of equal
importance, I feel, is to socially situate the ideas put forth in this book and
present the history of their production. Toward this end, I describe my
particular social-cultural-political location ("where I am coming from," if
you will).

It is my view that the modern conception of development is antidevelop-
mental and significantly contributes to arresting developmental activity and
to educational failure. Furthermore, as learning theory (so-called) has
become infused with developmental theory (so-called) over the past 30
years, the overly cognitive manner in which psychologists have come to
think about thinking, learning, and development has become more perva-

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