Engaging in the world as those around us perceive it is how we engage in what the Toltecs call the dream of the planet. In so-called innocence, kids manifest mostly love and little fear. The latter they have to learn or be taught: you can fall down, fire burns, ooh that hurt, some spiders may be poisonous, you have to behave, you have to follow these rules, being of a particular racial group informs your position in the world and your relationships with others, you can’t play in the mud, yo...

Cultural-historical and socio-cultural psychologists have studied the way in which cognition develops; paying close attention to how it is embedded in a given place and time, in biology, and in different sets of social relationships and meanings.

Scholars following a Vygotskian perspective have shown how ‘higher mental functions’ develop through social interaction, by mediating and reinterpreting biological needs in terms of socio-cultural understandings. This example does an awesome job...