Also in this second stage, "centration" is the tendency to focus only on certain aspects of an object, idea, or event and to ignore the rest. Children in this stage tend to centrate their perspective to one aspect of their perceptual field, failing to perceive other aspects or relationships of the phenomenon under investigation. For example, when asked by her parents what she did in Sunday School the child reports, "We had cookies." When they parents ask her what she learned about, the little girl replies, "The cookies were good." When the father, indicating his growing concern for the lack of content taught in the class, asks, "But did you talk about Jesus?," his daughter answers, "The cookies were chocolate." Mom and Dad may be tempted to conclude they should change churches or their daughter has no heart for spiritual matters.

However, says Piaget, what has really happened is that the child has "centrated," focusing only on that aspect of the Sunday School hour that was most sensory and most satisfy-ing to her. As she matures she will learn to "decenter," or focus on greater complexities in her perceptual environment. However, for the moment, her stage of cognitive development limits her capacity to perceive only the broad picture.

In the concrete operational stage "seriation" emerges, allowing children to number and place objects, events, and ideas in logical order. The preoperational child has great difficulty in placing historical events, such as those recorded in the Bible, in sequential order. Thus, whether Jesus or Moses came first is beyond the logical ability of a four-year-old. However, the nine-year-old has the ability to seriate, together with the ability to grasp concepts of time, space, and speed. These new abilities allow children to unscramble much of the information they acquired in previous years, but did not really understand.

However, while the child in his concrete operational years can order and understand their perceptual environment in much more satisfying ways, he is still limited to that which is concrete, that is, what he actually sees and experiences. Movement to the next stage, formal, opens the world of possibility and hypothesis to children. As children move into their adolescent years, the final liberation of their thinking emerges.

It is development into the formal operations stage that often influences an older child’s religious thinking. Adolescent agnosticism may emerge as the youth of the church wonder if God really does exist. Other questions of faith, such as the trustworthiness of Scripture or the exclusivity of Jesus as the only means of salvation may also emerge. However, these kinds of questions do not necessarily indicate a crisis in faith, rather they are simply indicative of the fact that young people are using their new cognitive capacities to think about their faith. In the long run, questioning is much better than never questioning. This is because questioning means thinking, and thinking is necessary for spiritual growth.

How do we apply the findings of Goldman, Piaget, and others to Christian education today? Goldman was influenced in his writing and research by the state of religious education in Great Britain during that time, a time in which religious training was part of the curriculum of the public schools. The problem was that children seemed to become less religious as a result of their religious training. In his attempt to speak to this problem, and to take Piaget’s work seriously, Goldman ended up advocating that the Bible not be taught until children had developed a proper "readiness for religion."