Exploratory Cycle

This cycle extends from the moment children enter school (between ages five and six) until approximately eight years of age. Hence, the current designation of the MEN includes grades zero, one, and two. The essential activity of this cycle is adequate adaptation to school, peers, rules of coexistence, relationships with teachers, time management, or the completion of tasks, among others. As can be seen, a social factor determines the beginning of the cycle, not a biological or developmental factor. Hence, this cycle could be significantly altered in other cultures and has varied significantly throughout history, as only recently has Basic Education become widespread for all. Despite this, factors associated with the maturation process, such as the development of self-control and decentralization, considerably favor the success of the process that begins at school with coexistence with other children of similar age and developmental conditions.

This is a period in which values ​​and socio-affective adaptation to school take priority, and which should essentially help the child understand themselves. The child's main task at the value level is to achieve a better and greater understanding of themselves. The child must know themselves physically, socially, and emotionally. They must recognize their physical characteristics, skin color, height, size, and distinctive facial and body features. Likewise, this process should serve the child to explore their interests and their relationship with their environment (hence the name of the cycle). One of the most notable advances in children has to do with the improvement in their capacity for self-control. Upon entering the "big school," disputes and tensions among children decrease significantly. The child socializes with other children and begins to postpone gratification. However, due to factors of under- or over-domination at home, some children tend to display excessively self-centered attitudes, aggression, and impulsiveness (Ausubel and Sullivan, vol. 2: 73). This problem has likely been on the rise in recent decades, as the number of broken homes and the permissive, neglectful, and ambivalent attitudes among families have increased, particularly among those belonging to the higher socioeconomic strata of the population.

As a result of the significant changes experienced by society and the family in the last half century (Tofller, 1985 and 1994; Drucker, 1994; Reich, 1993; Kennedy, 1993; Puyana, 2003; Gutiérrez, et al, 1997 and De Zubiría, X., Carrillo and Villalba, 2005 and De Zubiría, 2001), the authoritarian model in the family has weakened and in its place other styles of authority have emerged, among which two forms of relationship between parents and children stand out, known as permissive and ambivalent families, which coexist with authoritarian families, which continue to be quite numerous, especially in the lower strata of the population. These characteristics have been on the rise among families of young children from middle and upper-income families (De Zubiría, X, Carrillo, & Villalba, 2005; in De Zubiría, et al., 2009b).

In permissive families, the child acquires full authority to speak, express opinions, judge, act, and decide, at all times, places, and in all circumstances, thus completely diluting limits and authority in the home. The permissive parent considers their role to always and everywhere seek the "happiness of the child." Under these conditions, the child makes the decisions and imposes their will in the home. The adult becomes subordinate to the child's interests, and the child becomes the "little tyrant" who bites, mistreats, insults, humiliates, demands, and imposes his will, while the adults passively look on. The authoritarian is no longer the parent, as in traditional families, but the child himself. This family structure creates underpowered children, who strain relationships at school when they encounter other children of the same age, as the authoritarian attitudes they develop at home confront them with the limits imposed by teachers at educational institutions and by their own classmates.

Overdominant families have been more common throughout history and correspond to the style of domestic authority identified as authoritarian. In this way—and as a general trend—the father sets the family rules and evaluates and monitors his children's unrestricted adherence to them. He almost entirely determines the children's activities, their appropriate friendships, their professions, and even their own life plans. The main effect tends to be to depress the child's personality and socio-emotional activity, although it should be understood that the effects depend on a broad set of factors, including personality, gender, or the position one occupies in the family and the roles assumed by other members of the household (Ausubel and Sullivan, 1983, volume two). Alice Miller, in her text on punishment inflicted on children, supposedly for their own good, demonstrates the ravages of this type of education, which aims to break the will of children and turn them into docile and obedient beings. She demonstrates how, inevitably, the child who has been hit will hit in turn, the one who has been threatened will threaten, and the one who has been humiliated will humiliate. She demonstrates the vicious cycle of the authoritarian model (Miller, 1985).

Despite the above, children from subdominant families are the ones who present the greatest tension problems in kindergarten and in the "big school," as they are very likely to want to impose their will on their classmates and have difficulties with authority and the limits set by the teaching staff and the school as a whole. All teachers will appear authoritarian to them. In contrast, for overdominated children, the school institution represents the possibility of escaping punishment and family abuse. Meanwhile, in a subdominant family, the child who acts authoritarian at home tends to carry over his or her interpersonal relationship model to school, and there, he or she will likely also want to continue dominating and acting according to his or her own particular interests and whims, disregarding others and even less respecting the limits established by the institution.

On the other hand, children in this cycle express curiosity about natural and social phenomena, and this generates a movement in them that aims to unravel the nature of objects and ideas; this movement is essentially expressed through questions. Questions allow them to unravel an object or idea with the support of another person; in this case, a teacher. Children inquire and ask questions that demonstrate a search for the why and wherefore of things. Hence, they are often seen as curious. They are amazed and enthusiastic about understanding various phenomena. A particularly interested child, on the other hand, can be easily identified by the relevance of the questions they ask.

At the cognitive level, Piaget's work, with subsequent revisions (Flavell, 2000; Coll, 2002 and Delval, 2006; Ferreiro, 2005 and Yañez, 1998), allows us to develop a fairly precise and clear picture of its scope and limitations. The emergence of thought and language transforms the child's evolutionary development. This allows them to overcome the cognitive limitations established by time and space. This is the period in which the greatest development of vocabulary and communication in life occurs, while by eight or nine years of age, children already have most of the vocabulary they will use in life.

Although Piaget referred to this period in generally negative terms ("preoperational," "preconceptual," "prelogical," "illogical"), recent research has expanded its understanding and found notable cognitive developments not initially captured by genetic psychology. Among these, what stands out is what was found in the development of numerical reasoning (Flavell, 2000: 96 ff.). The child assigns a single name to each number (one-to-one principle), can recite numbers in a specific order (constant order); the last number equals the number of entities counted (cardinality). Likewise, any kind of entity can be counted (abstraction principle), and it is evident that order does not matter when counting objects (irrelevance of order). These principles can and should be developed in the next cycle by working on the properties of arithmetic, and their work is essential to guaranteeing teaching focused on understanding and the development of thinking, rather than on algorithms, as unfortunately still dominates in most schools around the world. All mathematical work in school is based on the aforementioned mathematical principles, as well as on the principles of conservation and invariants that the child will construct in the following cycle, according to the studies of Piaget and Inhelder (1980); hence the need to mediate them to ensure that each student fully masters them.

On an intellectual level, children operate with dichotomous and bipolar notions (good/bad, high/low, near/far, inside/outside, up/down, friend/enemy, etc.), spatial, temporal, and transdisciplinary notions that allow them to represent the world, but which limit their ability to grasp the nuances, degrees, and diverse "colors" of reality. As Davidov (1988: 34) demonstrated, children learn to classify according to various criteria; however, their classifications are usually made based on factors external to and visible to the objects and their own functionality. School should encourage classification using essential criteria and invisible properties, and in this way it fulfills its proper developmental role. This implies that the lack of schooling leads children to continue making classifications using external factors, as Luria and Vygotsky found in their research conducted in the early decades of the last century (Luria, 1978, 1995 edition). The difficulty in characterizing according to internal criteria is associated with the child's difficulty in differentiating between the part and the whole, since the part is visible, while the whole is not. The whole necessarily requires greater abstraction and generalization. This is because if I ask, for example, a four-year-old child whether there are more red roses or flowers, they will tend to answer that there are more red roses than flowers, since red roses are visible, while flowers are a greater abstraction that includes red, yellow, and white roses.

On an intellectual level, during this period, children master reading and writing texts and acquire their first propositions. However, their everyday knowledge is still no different from that acquired in school. They have not yet approached scientific knowledge, but they have already begun to classify objects according to criteria invisible to the human eye, which focus on internal and profound characteristics.

In Wallon's terms, the Exploratory Cycle is predominantly socio-affective, in which the central activity is adaptation and the emphasis is on interaction with the environment, self-knowledge, and improving the capacity for self-control.