Quotes from Jean Piaget

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; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.

Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do.

What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see.

Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely.

Play is the answer to how anything new comes about.

I could not think without writing.

Every response, whether it be an act directed towards the outside world or an act internalized as thought, takes the form of an adaptation or, better, of a re-adaptation.

Children should be able to do their own experimenting and their own research. Teachers, of course, can guide them by providing appropriate materials, but the essential thing is that in order for a child to understand something, he must construct it himself, he must re-invent it. 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 by himself will remain with him visibly for the rest of his life.

The individual acts only if he experiences a need, i.e., if the equilibrium between the environment and the organism is momentarily upset, and action tends to re-establish the equilibrium, i.e., to re-adapt the organism (Claparède).

Play is the work of childhood.

Logic is the mirror of thought, and not vice versa;in classes, relations et nombres; essai sur les groupements de logistique et la réversibilitié de lq pensée

Every structure is to be thought of as a particular form of equilibrium, more or less stable within its restricted field and losing its stability on reaching the limits of the field.

intelligence, the most plastic and at the same time the most durable structural equilibrium of behaviour, is essentially a system of living and acting operations.

theory or have remained unaffected by them. It is true that a fact can sometimes appear to resemble an "accident," as in the case of the apple that fell near Newton, but the accident only became a "fact" because Newton asked certain questions.

According to Claparède, feelings appoint a goal for behaviour, while intelligence merely provides the means (the "technique"). But there exists an awareness of ends as well as of means, and this continually modifies the goals of action.

to avoid the difficulties of teleological language, adaptation must be described as an equilibrium between the action of the organism on the environment and vice versa.

A response is thus a particular case of interaction between the external world and the subject, but unlike physiological interactions, which are of a material nature and involve an internal change in the bodies which are present, the responses studied by psychology are of a functional nature and are achieved at greater and greater distances in space (perception, etc.) and in time (memory, etc.) besides following more and more complex paths (reversals, detours, etc.).

We shall simply say then that every action involves an energetic or affective aspect and a structural or cognitive aspect, which, in fact, unites the different points of view already mentioned.

Every psychological explanation comes sooner or later to lean either on biology or on logic (or on sociology, but this in turn leads to the same alternatives).

Nel, after throwing a stone onto a sloping bank watching the stone rolling said, 'Look at the stone. It's afraid of the grass

But if all behaviour, without exception, thus implies an energetics or an "economy", forming its affective aspect, the interaction with the environment which it instigates likewise requires a form or structure to determine the various possible circuits between subject and object.

A fact is first an answer to a question. If Sartre had consulted psychologists before judging them in the light of his own genius, he would have learned that they do not wait on the accident but begin by setting themselves problems.

Piaget's work shows that our concepts of logic, space, time, number, quantity, etc., are not given readymade as Kant thought, but undergo a process of development.

We shall adopt an analogous formula, with the reservation that feelings and cognitive configurations do not depend solely on the existing "field," but also on the whole previous history of the acting subject.