The Mastery of Reason: Cognitive Development and the Production of Rationality

Originally published in 1988, The Mastery of Reason is, on one level, a study of children’s cognitive development. It engages with debates about the ‘individual’ and the ‘social context’ in accounts of children’s mathematical development at the time. However, Valerie Walkerdine seeks to go beyond these debates to establish the empirical and theoretical base for a different kind of understanding of the social and psychological production of reason and rationality. She does so by presenting e...