...who told you that lie? An educational psychologist?
More like "at age 12 even the most incompetent teacher can teach things involving abstract/counterfactual thinking to even the least intelligent child"... the bad ol' "lowest common denominator thinking" and the other horrors of our standardized educational systems :| Unfortunately it's not economically feasible to lecture to children in a classroom unless you calibrate on the lowest common denominator.
Also, it's the huuuge difference between "understanding" and "being able to communicate efficiently in words". People can "grok" very advanced stuff even if they don't fully command the language for expressing it. Unfortunately most incompetent teachers are totally incapable of "trying to explain something beyond the level of the language" but the human brain's pattern matching engines are not always tied to language...
Piaget's classification of thinking skills is good, but the theory that these kinds of thinking are developed in discrete stages at those ages has only vague experimental support.
Young children can engage in basic counterfactuals. Ask one.
More like "at age 12 even the most incompetent teacher can teach things involving abstract/counterfactual thinking to even the least intelligent child"... the bad ol' "lowest common denominator thinking" and the other horrors of our standardized educational systems :| Unfortunately it's not economically feasible to lecture to children in a classroom unless you calibrate on the lowest common denominator.
Also, it's the huuuge difference between "understanding" and "being able to communicate efficiently in words". People can "grok" very advanced stuff even if they don't fully command the language for expressing it. Unfortunately most incompetent teachers are totally incapable of "trying to explain something beyond the level of the language" but the human brain's pattern matching engines are not always tied to language...