International Conference
LEARNING TO THINK FOR ACTION
November 23-25, 2012, Madrid

We all know that early childhood is a fundamental stage for the development of the individual, because the physical, biological, physiological and psychological structures, being formed, at birth become fully shaped when the child is between five to seven years old. Henri Pieron stated that, at birth, the child is merely a "candidate for humanity." This means that there is a very long road from birth to full human life and participation in humanity. The link between them, which allows passage from one to another, is education. And this education will set and shape the future adult.

Education will direct and determine how development occurs. Within a dialectical approach where the internal is driven by the external and from this game between the internal and external factors, all mental processes, including thought arise and take shape. Depending on how we orientate the education process, we will shape the child's thinking: If the educational methods we use are reproductive and rigid, where the discovery of the essential relationships by themselves cannot take place, we are hampering the development of thought, which will become equally rigid and reproductive.

At every stage of the development of the child, he can assimilate the characteristics of the surrounding structures according to his level of development, but he also has a chance to assimilate the world in a much richer and creative when this thinking is done through joint activities with the adult; this is what is called a proximal development zone, which should guide the entire process of teaching and education to attain greater development achievements. In other words, the child is learning to think in a qualitatively higher manner than when his education relies solely on the simple reproduction of the surrounding world.

Learning to think in a qualitatively higher level is not a utopia but a reality, the problem is how we manage to help children to learn to think.

This implies, among other things, to organize the process of learning to think based on their natural curiosity and attitude to their surroundings, knowing how to provide information, design appropriate means, enable direct action of the child on what is intended to be learnt, and verbalize what he does, starting, of course, with the conditions and characteristics of the mental processes on the stage. That is, to start from the child, who is building his own cognitive structures based on the conditions created and directed by the adult.

To reflect on how to organize the process of learning to think in our classrooms, we have organized the International Conference LEARNING TO THINK FOR ACTION.