Quotes from Jean Piaget

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.

This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.

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.

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.

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.

Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.

To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active.

Childish egocentrism is, in its essence, an inability to differentiate between the ego and the social environment.

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 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.

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 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.

If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.

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.

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.

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.

Thus arises the solution proposed by the so-called Gestalt psychology: behaviour involves a total field embracing subject and objects, and the dynamics of this field constitutes feeling (Lewin), while its structure depends on perception, effector-functions, and intelligence.

Knowledge is not predetermined by heredity; it is not predetermined in the things around us - in knowing things around him the subject always adds to them.

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 all the rest of his life.

But these structures, forming different levels, are to be regarded as succeeding one another according to a law of development, such that each one brings about a more inclusive and stable equilibrium for the processes that emerge from the preceding level.

This new philosophical psychology can in this respect be traced back to Maine de Biran, for even if in his time scientific psychology was unaware of its autonomy, and even if Biranian psychology was only critical of that of the empiricists, Biran believed in the Kantian distinction of noumena and phenomena and took care to limit his inquiry to the latter alone, which did not prevent him from extending it in the form of idealist speculations.

For some writers mental phenomena become intelligible only when related to the organism. This view is of course inescapable when we study the elementary functions (perception, motor functions, etc.) in which intelligence originates. But we can hardly see neurology explaining why 2 and 2 make 4, or why the laws of deduction are forced on the mind of necessity.

Formal logic, or logistics, is simply the axiomatics of states of equilibrium of thought, and the positive science corresponding to this axiomatics is none other than the psychology of thought.

To expect a fact, is by definition to expect the isolated, it is for positivism, to prefer the 'accident' to the essential, the contingent to the necessary, disorder to order; it is in principle to reject the essential in the future: