The previous chapters have traced cognitive, social, and linguistic developments between the years of 1 and 5 in human childhood with the aim of understanding how normally developing individuals make the transition from infancy to childhood. The basic underlying assumption of this effort is that to understand development, it is necessary to understand the developing system in all its complexity, including its organismic, experiential, social, and cultural history. This does not imply neglect of the separate parts of the developing system at particular phases of development. But as a theoretical enterprise it is important to see the pieces as parts of a whole that is an ongoing, historically constituted, forward-looking individual person within a social-cultural matrix. At this point, then, I return to the themes set out in the first section of the book.

Becoming an Encultured Individual

The destiny of human individuals (as stated in Chapter 1) is to enter into a cultural environment, complete with all the social institutions, symbolic forms, artifacts, activities, interpersonal scripts, rules, expectations, technologies, fashions, moral strictures, and so on. Not least of these are the languages of the groups within which participatory interactions take place. These languages – often two or more linguistic systems, always more than one social register (e.g., formal and informal, peer and adult) – become the vehicle of enculturation as well as the content and structure of internal representations and the tools of complex thinking.