Abstract:

The aim of this article is to describe the concept, the source, the characteristics and the main manifestations of a rather neglected issue in child development, namely egocentrism in school-age children, according to David Ekind's theory. Egocentrism takes on a unique form in each stage of cognitive development and constitutes a negative but necessary by-product of each stage. First, we describe briefly the concept, the source and the decline of egocentrism in general as well as those of the sensorimotor and the preoperational egocentrism. Then, the association between egocentrism in school-age children and concrete operational abilities is discussed. The "assumptive realities", that is, the inability to distinguish between the products of thought and the perceptual data, is analyzed as the main characteristic of concrete operational egocentrism. This form of egocentrism manifests itself as a differentiation failure between the transient and the abiding rules, between the subjective and the objective rules, and between the particular and the universal rules. With the emergence of formal operational abilities, children become able to decentrate their thought by testing hypotheses against reality and discovering their arbitrary nature. Finally, several educational implications, that is, ways through which the educator can reduce his/her students' egocentrism and facilitate their transition to higher levels of cognitive functioning, are suggested.

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