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The paper supplements the concept of the development of narrative role-playing. The “anchor” of the analysis is the definition, provided more than thirty years ago by D.B. Elkonin, of play and its unit and the concept of the emergence, flourishing, and decline of this type of play. A description is presented of the key points in the development of the form of play activity from the stage when narrative role-playing is merely a future necessity to the stage of its actual form and finally to the point when it becomes a resource for further development. The focus is on the child’s inner experience of the play activity and on the two dimensions and conflict inherent in the transition to a new form of activity. The axis of the description of the ontogenesis of narrative role-playing is the process of the emergence of new forms of activity: “make believe” during the early years; the dual-phase play activity, in which a challenge and a response to the challenge are bound up (preschool years); the internal action plan (school age). The paper presents not only a scientific picture of the development of play based on experimental data, but also the place/prevalence of play in children’s lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both the semiotic analysis of texts from traditional cultures and experimental investigation of thinking in these cultures reveal coincidences between the thinking of adults from traditional groups and the thinking of European children. The fact that followers of Piaget equate the thinking of adults in traditional societies with the thinking of European children was recently criticized by M. Cole, but he too did not explain the reason for the coincidence in experimental results and, correspondingly, in thinking.[10] Second, this paper accepts Vygotsky's proposition that the development of verbal thinking involves the continuous advance in the way words are used in thinking to other ways that are qualitatively different (Vygotsky 1956). The functional approach to thinking that we have adopted leads to the conclusion that ontogenesis of thinking in principle cannot lead to the emergence of thinking in scientific, consciously perceived concepts unless the culture has texts that demand this type of thinking and unless the development of children's thinking is guided a certain way. [Extracted from the article]