Jean Piaget was the outstanding, developmental, psychologist of the 20th century. The result of his work had appeared in close to a hundred books and literally thousands of research articles and book chapters. The impact of his work upon social science has been enormous and his work alone has contributed to the rapid growth of developmental and experimental child psychology. Increasingly, in education, his work has an impact upon the curriculum and educational practice, all of which now reflect Piaget’s conception of mental development.
At the age of ten, he published his first scientific paper an observation of an albino sparrow. By the time he was 16, he was so well published that he was offered sight-unseen the curatorship of the museum. He had to turn down the offer, however, as he hadn’t yet completed high school. Once in university, Piaget pursued his avid interest in biology, psychology, and philosophy. Rather than choose between these three disciplines, Piaget did what many other geniuses had done before them. He combined these three disciplines into a new discipline, which he called genetic epistemology.
GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY
Epistemology is that branch of philosophy that attempts to answer the question how we know the world. In the past, philosophers attempted to answer this question by armchair analysis. But Piaget took a different tack. He wanted to answer the question experimentally to put the question to nature. He chose to do this by exploring how children progressively construct the world as a result of both experience and mental maturity. It is the idea that our knowledge about the world grows in stages which parallel our mental growth that makes Piaget’s a truly genetic epistemology. For Piaget, what develops and what allows children to construct and reconstruct their world is human intelligence, adaptive thought and action. So, Piaget’s studies always deal with two issues. On the one hand, he is concerned with the content of thought with what children know. On the other hand, he is concerned with the process of knowing of how and why of children’s knowledge. So, for Piaget, he really doesn’t believe that there is an absolute separation between the process of knowing and the content of our knowledge. In a word, there is no knowledge without intelligence and no intelligence without knowledge. Piaget’s theory of human intelligence evolved during his long and productive life.
During the 1920s, the first period of his work, he studied children’s language, their conceptions of the physical world and the evolution of their moral judgments. He found that young children were egocentric in their thinking and failed to take the point of view of the other person in either their language or their thought. Young children, for example, often talk at rather than to another child. In the same way, young children may believe that the sun follows them when they go for a walk. As children mature, they lose their egocentrism and begin to take other people’s standpoints into account, they become sociocentric.
During this early period of his career, Jean Piaget created a new methodology, which he and his collaborators used throughout all of their latter research. From the field of mental testing, Piaget barreled the idea of asking all children the same question. And from psychiatry Piaget barreled the idea of an open-ended inquiry. He put these two ideas together and created the semi-clinical interview.
Jean Piaget was concerned with children’s language, with their moral development and their conceptions of the world. And he discovered the children begin to think egocentrically, they thin
By taking seriously what others had written off as errors, Piaget was able to observe and to describe what might be called the hidden side of the child’s mind. He was in this way able to make us purvey to that vast store of knowledge and thinking which is so different from our own. Towards the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, Piaget’s second period began in which he turned to look at the very beginnings of intelligence and the construction of the world as it emerged in the young infant. These investigations were probably stimulated by the fact that Piaget had married and now had infants of his own to observe. In his studies of his own three children, Piaget could not use the semi-clinical interview because infants can’t talk. Instead, he devised a brilliant set of non-verbal tests to explore how infants explore and construct their world. And one of the things that he discovered was that it was not until the age of about six or seven months, the children really understood that objects continue to exist after they disappear from our senses.
ASSIMILATION
Children construct reality by means of assimilation and accommodation. Play is almost a pure form of assimilation. Assimilation always involves a transformation of reality in the service of the self. When a child uses a stone as a turtle or a potato chip as a butterfly, the child is transforming the object to serve a personal fantasy.
ACCOMMODATION
Accommodation is the transformation of ourselves to meet the demands of the world. For example, when we drag ourselves out of a warm comfortable bed on a cold morning, ah… we are sacrificing our personal comfort to meet the demands of the world. And although we can talk about assimilation and accommodation as if they were entirely separate all human thought and all human action involves them both. Very young infants perceive the world as a series of fleeting pictures as the child progressively brings together assimilates visual, auditory, tactual, and olfactory experiences. She gradually constructs the schema of a permanent object. With this schema, the child can search for the hidden object, accommodate to its disappearance because the child now grasps that the object continues to exist even though what is out of sight.
PERMANENT OBJECT
The schema of the personal object is the first of many conservation concepts, which we acquire and enable us to think. Imagine trying to think about a dog which became a cat, a squirrel, a bird and a raccoon in rapid succession. If persons, or places, or things did not exhibit a permanence, we would never be able to think about them in a logical way.
CONSERVATION
Whenever we form a schema at the sensory motor level or a concept at the verbal level, we are forming a constant, a conservation. Once we construct a concept of a dog, we can identify all manner of dogs swiftly and accurately, we can also talk with other about dogs in a meaningful way. As in the first stage of his work, Piaget was able to create tasks that other researchers could use to reveal the great discrepancy between the way in which infants and older children and adults view the world. The brilliance of the infancy work was Piaget’s ability to see beyond what anyone before him had seen and to be able to formulate a theory to account for his original observations. The third stage of Piaget’s work covered more than three decades from the mid-1930s to the 1960s. During this period, Piaget introduced a logical model to describe the course of mental development.
At the same time, Piaget tried to meld his earlier models into his later conceptualization. Not surprisingly has Piaget’s models got more complex, his books became more difficult to read. Nonetheless, Piaget was a genius in creating experiments, which made his concepts easy to understand and to appreciate.
During the third period of his work, Piaget published books on children’s conception of space, time, number, speed and the mechanisms of perception. It was also during this period that Piaget described and elaborated the four major stages of development for which he is perhaps best known. Piaget saw mental growth as an upward expanding spiral. At each stage of development, the child deals with the same issues of space, time, causality(ph) and so on, but at a higher more complex level.
SENSORIMOTOR
The first two years of life make up the sensorimotor period, during which a child is primarily concerned with creating a world of permanent objects. At this stage, the child gets to know and construct her world by grasping, dropping, banging and tasting it.
PREOPERATIONAL
During the second preoperational stage from about the age of two to about the age of seven, the child reconstructs the world at the symbolic level. For example, the child now acquires names for the objects constructed during the sensorimotor level. Children’s play provides a unique opportunity for them to match their verbal labels with the real object.
CONCRETE OPERATIONAL
The third stage Piaget called concrete operational and it emerges between the ages of 6 or 7 and last until the ages of 11 or 12. During this stage, the child again reconstructs her world, but now on the basis of rules, numbers, classes and relations. This explains why formal schooling, which involves the acceptance of rules is not usually begun until children have attained concrete operations.
FORMAL OPERATIONAL
Beginning at about the age of 11 or 12, the adolescent period, young people move into the stage of formal operations. During this stage, they construct an expansive world of ideals, possibilities, how things might be, but are not. Often these ideal worlds become more influential than the real one. Young people may find fault with their real parents and teachers, because they do not measure up to the teenagers newly constructed ideal parents and teachers. During the last phase of his work, approximately the last two decades before his death in 1980 at age 84, Piaget dealt with a number of different issues, like memory and imagery. He was able to show for example that memory is not just a file cabinet of stored facts but rather a dynamic system. As children grow older and attain higher levels of mental ability, they in effect reconstruct the facts they have stored in memory and are able to recall them better than when they were younger. He demonstrated this remarkable improvement in a simple longitudinal experiment which he described at a conference in Tokyo in 1971. He was able to show that a child remembered a pattern at age eight better than at age five when she had seen it for the first and only time.
Since we cannot distinguish ‘true’ from ‘false’ by the content of a memory, it follows that every memory contains an element of reconstruction of the past. The activity of memory is usually presented in terms of code: coding and de-coding. When an event is perceived, just as I perceive this auditorium, a number of perceptions are recorded in code form. Later on, when I think of you in my memory, there is a de-coding. The code permits us to organize a memory from the moment it is recorded until it is evoked. Dr. Inhelder and I posed this problem: Is the code of memory invariant? Is it the same at all ages–the same for preschool children as for 10-15-year old? Or does the code itself change? Our hypothesis is that the code of memory depends on intelligence–on the child’s operational level. The code changes from one level to another. It improves, becomes more structured, according to the progress of the child’s intelligence.
Piaget’s contribution to our knowledge of human development has been enormous. At the heart of that contribution are two basic conceptions. One of these is that human intelligence always grows in a series of stages which are related to age and which cannot be hurried. The other is that human knowledge is always a creation. Knowledge always reflects, both the child’s mental activity and information coming from the environment. Knowledge is never simply a copy of the external world, nor simply a projection of our inner world. Learning about the world is a creative activity and all knowledge is a creation. Recent curriculum, reforms and elementary math, reading and writing programs are beginning to take account of the creative role of children and the learning process.
