According to the theory of constructivism, development and transformation of practical knowledge are a vital process that is unavoidable and that occurs without there being necessarily an intention to educate or to learn. A human being can effectively consider the circumstances of his or her existence when he or she produces this kind of knowledge: one always knows something that is relatively viable for oneself! Contrary to traditional writings that evaluate practical knowledge according to their degree of conformity to “established” school knowledge, the analysis proposed here considers that it is formal school learning that should be subjected to the constraints of pratical informal learning.

Excerpt: I would like to show how the constructivist point of view makes it possible to develop a vision of the whole of educational phenomena which is comprehensive and penetrating and which, at the same time, is both viable and even fertile. This kind of vision would embrace education as much in terms of its psychological, developmental, socioaffective, and psychopedagogical aspects as of its cognitive and didactic aspects. By the same token, I would also like to show what occurs when the constructivist approach is widened to include all educational phenomena: It is possible at that point to contextualize and delimit application of the approach in relation to more specific problematics involved with schooling and teaching – two areas that, after all, form only a subset of the entire educational field.