The Development of Competence and Its Social Context

Several recent interpretations of the nature and development of competence are discussed, focusing on Gelman's proposal to view the development of concepts as the product of the interaction of conceptual, procedural, and utilization competences. In so doing, she proposes a solution to the dilemma ( which many other theories could not avoid) of emphasizing either the construction of knowledge or the influence of experience in the development of understanding. However, Gelman does not consider the basically social nature of the development of competence. In this essay, it is argued that adults transmit perspectives on reality to children and in this way introduce them to what is considered worth knowing in the culture. Because a child's present abilities are integrated into such perspectives, these abilities are, at the same time, both utilized and modified. It is, therefore, implausible to ascribe the availability of general principles to very young children, as Gelman does in her theory of numerical competence. Two rival experiments on the development of numerical concepts are discussed. It is argued that the solution the children construct in these experiments is dependent on the perspective transmitted to them by the experimenter. Some educational consequences of a social context view on competence are presented.