Top 99 Quotes & Sayings by Jean Piaget
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
Play is the answer to the question, 'How does anything new come about?'
This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.
During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions.
The current state of knowledge is a moment in history, changing just as rapidly as the state of knowledge in the past has ever changed and, in many instances, more rapidly.
I always like to think on a problem before reading about it.
Children's games constitute the most admirable social institutions. The game of marbles, for instance, as played by boys, contains an extremely complex system of rules - that is to say, a code of laws, a jurisprudence of its own.
Logical reasoning is an argument which we have with ourselves and which reproduces internally the features of a real argument.
Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions.
The practice of narrative and argument does not lead to invention, but it compels a certain coherence of thought.
Every acquisition of accommodation becomes material for assimilation, but assimilation always resists new accommodations.
Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.
Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do: when neither innateness nor learning has prepared you for the particular situation.
In other words, knowledge of the external world begins with an immediate utilisation of things, whereas knowledge of self is stopped by this purely practical and utilitarian contact.
Our problem, from the point of view of psychology and from the point of view of genetic epistemology, is to explain how the transition is made from a lower level of knowledge to a level that is judged to be higher.
Play is the work of childhood.
I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother's poor mental health.
During the first few months of an infant's life, its manner of taking the breast, of laying its head on the pillow, etc., becomes crystallized into imperative habits. This is why education must begin in the cradle.
Egocentrism appears to us as a form of behavior intermediate between purely individual and socialized behavior.
In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning.
From this time on, the universe is built up into an aggregate of permanent objects connected by causal relations that are independent of the subject and are placed in objective space and time.
Everyone knows that at the age of 11-12, children have a marked impulse to form themselves into groups and that the respect paid to the rules and regulations of their play constitutes an important feature of this social life.
The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense.
To accustom the infant to get out of its own difficulties or to calm it by rocking it may be to lay the foundations of a good or of a bad disposition.
To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active.
The self thus becomes aware of itself, at least in its practical action, and discovers itself as a cause among other causes and as an object subject to the same laws as other objects.
The more the schemata are differentiated, the smaller the gap between the new and the familiar becomes, so that novelty, instead of constituting an annoyance avoided by the subject, becomes a problem and invites searching.
Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.
From the moral as from the intellectual point of view, the child is born neither good nor bad but master of his destiny.
The child of three or four is saturated with adult rules. His universe is dominated by the idea that things are as they ought to be, that everyone's actions conform to laws that are both physical and moral - in a word, that there is a Universal Order.
The main functions of intelligence, that of inventing solutions and that of verifying them, do not necessarily involve one another. The first partakes of imagination; the second alone is properly logical.
Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures.
Childish egocentrism is, in its essence, an inability to differentiate between the ego and the social environment.
All morality consists in a system of rules, and the essence of all morality is to be sought for in the respect which the individual acquires for these rules.
One of the most striking things one finds about the child under 7-8 is his extreme assurance on all subjects.
It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.
To reason logically is so to link one's propositions that each should contain the reason for the one succeeding it, and should itself be demonstrated by the one preceding it. Or at any rate, whatever the order adopted in the construction of one's own exposition, it is to demonstrate judgments by each other.
Scientific knowledge is in perpetual evolution; it finds itself changed from one day to the next.
Before playing with his equals, the child is influenced by his parents. He is subjected from his cradle to a multiplicity of regulations, and even before language he becomes conscious of certain obligations.
The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.
The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things.
With regard to moral rules, the child submits more or less completely in intention to the rules laid down for him, but these, remaining, as it were, external to the subject's conscience, do not really transform his conduct.
Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process.
On the one hand, there are individual actions such as throwing, pushing, touching, rubbing. It is these individual actions that give rise most of the time to abstraction from objects.
Logical activity is not the whole of intelligence. One can be intelligent without being particularly logical.
I engage my subjects in conversation, patterned after psychiatric questioning, with the aim of discovering something about the reasoning underlying their right but especially their wrong answers.
The child often sees only what he already knows. He projects the whole of his verbal thought into things. He sees mountains as built by men, rivers as dug out with spades, the sun and moon as following us on our walks.
When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself.
Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society . . . but for me and no one else, education means making creators. . . . You have to make inventors, innovators...not conformists
The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done-men who are creative, inventive, and discovers. The second goal of education is to form minds which can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered.
Experience precedes understanding.
Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand, that which we allow him to discover for himself will remain with him visible for the rest of his life.
Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what is already known? Or should we try to develop creative and innovative minds, capable of discovery from the preschool age on, throughout life?
Children require long, uniterrupted periods of play and exploration
How can we, with our adult minds, know what will be interesting? If you follow the child...you can find out something new.
What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see.
Play is the answer to how anything new comes about.
What is desired is that the teacher ceased being a lecturer, satisfied with transmitting ready-made solutions. His role should rather be that of a mentor stimulating initiative and research.
Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves.
Teaching means creating situations where structures can be discovered.
Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do.
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