The subject of this paper is the concept of development in life span psychology. The claim was put forward that the picture of human development presented by contemporary developmental psychology is unsatisfactory, and that the reason for this is the incompatibility of the methodological paradigm of natural sciences adopted by psychology with the specificity of the object of study of developmental psychology. An analysis of the nature of development within Bernard Kaplan’s genetic-dramatism perspective and John R. Searle’s theory of mind and social reality was presented. Also, its methodological implications were delineated, drawing attention to the attempt of both perspectives to coordinate the logic of cause and effect with the one of intention, purposes and aims in studying human development

Cheating in school, which involves presentation of someone else’s work as one’s own in order to obtain a reward and avoid punishment by meeting the teacher’s expectations, seems to take place in heteronomous education, which is subordinated to a given curriculum. There is no reason for cheating in autonomous education, where the authorship of students and teachers in school is respected. Nevertheless, schools with their students and teachers do not enjoy a full autonomy and they never will. Autonomous education consists in implementing a curriculum derived from the students and teachers’ internal interpretation of educational good and giving every student an opportunity to enjoy it. The educational good has the nature of an ideal, which is not directly accessible, but which can be captured by the human mind only through inner interpretation, although never fully and never clearly enough. It is essential to introduce education in relation to the child’s development. Following Szuman (1959), Przetacznikowa (1963) and Wygotski (1971) – Niemczyński (2016a, 2017) presented a theory of the convergence of child’s development with education. It argues that the autonomous development of children and adolescents draws support from education as long as education protects it from heteronomous pressure. The more effective this protection is, the less probability there is of cheating in school and the more importance is awarded to the respect for the authorship of intellectual products at school. This could take place in a school managed in a way that respects the autonomy of education.