Our goal is to be aware of the child’s natural development sequence, what new capacities unfold at each age and stage, and to provide a rich model-environment to play, explore and develop that. Doing so insures that each stage of development is full and strong which becomes the foundation of what comes next. To expect a child to open later capacities too early weakens the current foundation and that weakens everything that comes next. This is a critical flaw that our society repeats over and over and younger and younger.

So this is concrete operational thinking but does the child need all this esoteric theory to develop it?  Far from it.  Making things and singing, making cookies, the erector sets, building little houses and all this that they want passionately to do, all that is concrete operations.  Taking one material, turning it into something else, and that will certainly be all the development they need.  They don't need to learn to walk on fire or bend metal to accomplish what should be done between 7 and 11.  I think those things; I used to think they were important.  I know think they're the peripheral kind of things that can accidentally happen because of the way the system is structured.  

So, let me say that during this period of concrete operations, to force the child into premature absorption in academic process is to my way of thinking a real error.  Why?  Because you're robbing from this period and trying to achieve what should happen in the next period too soon, so the child loses both ways.  You kind of loose the best of both worlds. Premature abstractions.  What do I mean by that?  Well we now find them teaching physics in the third grade.  Our school, we have physics in the third grade and we have chemistry and so on.  Well these are pretty watered down things.  And not to say that the kid doesn't need it.  They're bored with it, they don't want anything like that.  Who cares?  Now why do they not care?  Because any and all possibilities are equally valid to them.  Oh sure you can do that, but so what.  You can do anything else the child is saying in effect.  

Now let's look at the difference of that and what's going to happen at age 11.  At age 11 all sorts of things are going to happen in that brain system and all of the sudden they are capable of the discipline of restricted thought where they can look at chemistry as a set of equations and formulas and all, do this and this and this will happen, okay, in the 7 to 11 year old set where all things are equally possible they can't restrict their thinking in that way.  If you turned the loose in the laboratory they'd blow themselves up if given half of a chance.  They're not ready for it.  They're not ready for the rigid controls of mathematics.  In mathematics all things are not equally valid at all.  Everything stands for its own particular meaning and it must be that exclusively and the way the whole structure works is a very tight logic.  You must be able to follow that logic and exclude all other things from it.  And the early child, this 7 to 11 period, with that brain chalked full of incredible possibility, they just aren't interested in that kind of a limited rigid approach.  They really have very little discipline and they don't need it at that point when everything is possible.

We find that the triune brain hypothesis that I've been presenting here, following Paul MacLean gives us our way of understanding this.  People say it's only a metaphor but boy is it physically real.  So for the higher structure to play on the lower structure and change the lower structure is something all of us have intuitively known all of our life.  When we speak of this wise guy a long time ago who spoke of coming into dominion over the world, what do you suppose he meant by coming into dominion over the world?  It means simply being able to utilize what nature has given us, these higher evolutionary structures.  To do what?  To move ourselves out of, we can't move ourselves out of, but to come into dominion over the lower evolutionary structures so that we can do what?  So that we can just use them freely and move on into the higher.  

And, what is happening today is we're using all these higher intellectual processes simply to dominate and try to predict and control and completely control an infinitely complex universal system and there's no way in the world intellect can do it.  Intellect really operates on a very linear digital thing, kind of either or.  Your classical truth tables of logic really are the picture of modern day intellect.  It's either or and there's no in between.  Either A or not A, you don't remember that, the law of the excluded middle, you can't have it both ways and this is the whole scientific premise.  And you must follow that discipline but you'll end up of course what, really using all this on behalf of the lowest evolutionary structures and this is essentially devolutionary.

Anything which is devolutionary becomes destructive and the strange destructiveness that's sweeping the world today, threatening the very planet itself, is simply this intellectual attempt to predict and control every event.  What must we do in order to really open up into these evolutionary structures of the mind is a complete open ended faith that the lower system will take care of us once it's developed.  That really sounds like a preacher doesn't it.  But it's the truth.  That's where we stand and a child knows this and it's very difficult, we have to really beat that child into submission to get him to leave the natural system and adapt to this highly artificial intellectual process.  So the first 15 years are all spent locked in on coming to terms with what is presented here, learning about it in order to move beyond it.