Ο εγωκεντρισμός του παιδιού σχολικής ηλικίας: ένα λησμονησμένο αναπτυξιακό φαινόμενο

Περίληψη

The aim of this article is to describe the concept, the source, the characteristics and the main manifestations of a rather forgotten issue in child development, namely egocentrism in school-age children, according to David Elkind's theory. Egocenttism 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 egocenutrism in general, as well as those of the sensorimotor and the preoperational egocentrism. Then, the association between egocentrism in school-age children and the concrete operational abilities is discussed. The "assumptive realities", that is the inability to distinguish between the products of thought and the perceptual data, is analysed 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