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This paper focuses on the relation between two areas of research which owe a great debt to the work of Giyoo Hatano: the ways in which the use of the abacus mediates arithmetic problem solving and the way in which the use of the kanji writing system mediates the interpretation of unfamiliar words. These examples are related to L. S. Vygotsky's ideas about the ways in which particular kinds of mediational means can serve as psychological tools for accomplishing culturally valued problem solving. They also urge upon us the need to be cautious when we are tempted to order culturally valued mediational means in terms of a unilinear evolutionary sequence.

The goal of this paper is to examine efforts to understand the developmental consequences, particularly the cognitive consequences, of children spending large amounts of time in formal schools where their activity is separated from the daily life of the rest of the community and mediated by technologies of literacy and numeracy as well as specialized uses of language. The analysis begins by examining the history of formal schooling in relation to its social and cultural circumstances and progresses through an examination of different research strategies for reaching plausible conclusions about its cognitive consequences in the sociocultural context. The discussion ends by considering two contradictory tendencies, centralized standardization versus de-centralized adaptation and separation versus embeddedness, which have characterized education since its inception and which societies around the world confront in our current historical circumstances.