Constructivism and constitutionalism: Some implications for the first mathematics education

There is a dualistic assumption underlying constructivism: thinking takes place in an inner subjective world, divorced from the outer objective reality and knowledge is constructed there by the individual through material and mental acts. In a phenomenological framework the fundamental unity between human beings and the world in which they live is assumed. Knowledge represents ways of seeing, experiencing, thinking about the world and it is constituted through the internal relation between the knower (subject) and the know (object). It is shown that these two kinds of ontological and epistemological assumption have radically different implications for how the development of arithmetic skills is seen and conceptualized