Second, in the approach to human ontogeny proposed by
Karmiloff-Smith, attention to the cultural dimension of development
is minimal, as it is in Piaget. This is a serious omission,
considering that a large part of human cognitive development
consists in children learning from other human beings things that
have been devised collaboratively by adults and modified to meet new
exigencies over many generations of history. Thus the child does not
need to invent the language that it learns to speak, the tools it
learns to use, and one can only speculate what children's
development of mathematical and notational skills would be if there
were not some cultural conventions already existing....