The present study, located in the socio-cultural tradition of research in developmental psychology, uses experimental tasks, adapted from the groundbreaking Lurian study (Luria, 1979, 1976) to investigate South African children’s acquisition and development of thinking and concepts – involving classification and generalisation, and how these concepts are linked to the specific cultural context of their manifestation.The paper provides new ways of understanding possible causes of contemporary problems that children encounter during classroom learning by examining the developmental roots of the specific modes of thinking and concept development in their concrete learning and developmental settings and specific tradition of learning within their schooling.