if you want to understand orange juice, you better understand the orange first. If you want to teach a baby the concept of motherhood, you probably don't want to start with discussion on reproduction. You want to start with something the baby understands and is interested in: Mama. Then build on that. All of us learned at a pretty early age that hot things can cause pain to us. But we probably learned that abstraction from a concrete, real example. I'm sure my wife and I explained the abstract concept to our son lots of times: "Don't touch hot things!" But he learned it one evening while he was helping his mother cook dinner. This reality is based in motivation . My son at the age of 5 wasn't greatly motivated by a desire to benefit from his parent's years of experience. However, he was motivated by his desire to not feel pain. The Pythagorean Theorem is an amazing, powerful tool. But if you want to teach the Pythagorean Theorem to a young person, which approach do you thing will be more successful (image me illustrating these concepts on the blackboard as I talk): ?  Here is a triangle. What is the length of the hypotenuse? You can determine the length of the hypotenuse with this formula: the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Here, let's try it. ?  On a baseball diamond, it's 90' from home plate to