Zak Stein is a writer and educator with a doctorate in human development and education from Harvard University. Working with Kurt Fischer, he helped further hone and nuance developmental stage theories as part of the neo-Piagetian consensus. Deeply influenced by integral philosophy, he has also articulated many crucial critiques of the movement in an attempt to emphasize the dynamical and contextual nature of stage assessments. Here Zak and Brendan discuss just what the science tells us about the reality of stages; the problems around their simplification, reification, and misapplication; the question of how well they map onto socio-cultural development; the importance of processual vs. categorical thinking; and what development can and can't do as part of a metamodern spiritual metanarrative.  

0:00 Introduction 

1:12 Static Stages or Dynamic Processes? A Metapsychological Clarification 

10:18 Being "at" a Stage? Development as an Ecology of Skillsets 

19:23 Non-Linear Growth and Ranges of Operation: Fractal Skill-Chunking across Domains 

24:05 The Car Mechanic and the Quantum Mechanic: Transferable Skills and the Importance of Embodiment 

28:55 Roots of Cognitive Complexity 

1:57 The Recapitulation Theory: Does Phylogeny Map Ontogeny? 

36:50 The Growth to Goodness Issue: Complexification and Pathology 

41:31 Better Heuristics than Stages? Learning Processes, Capacity Asymmetries, and Dynamics of Teacherly Authority 

48:18 Theory vs. (Mis)Application: Are Stage Theories Just "B.S. and Colonial as Hell"? 

59:41 Generalizing Developmental Space 

1:05:30 Development as Metanarrative? Stage Theories and the Religion that's not a Religion