August 9 – Happy Birthday, Jean Piaget

nPosted on August 9, 2019

Key points

Today’s famous birthday (born in Switzerland on this date in 1895) became famous partly by studying his own children!

nJean Piaget was fascinated by what he noticed about his own brain. For example, when he was a teenager, his former nanny claimed that he was almost kidnapped but that she had fought off the would-be child thief. Piaget formed a memory of the incident, but then it turned out that the nanny was lying. Even after he knew and accepted that the whole kidnapping thing was a tall tale, Piaget STILL had a memory of it!

nWe can all form false memories, it turns out. Piaget’s attention to this sort of phenomenon was important as he learned about biology, zoology, psychology, philosophy, and logic.

After going to university, Piaget worked with a French psychologist who created the first IQ test. He noticed that young children consistently made kinds of mistakes that older children and adults never made, and Piaget developed an idea that young kids think differently than the rest of us do – that there are stages in how a human learns to think.

nAnd it was when Piaget had his own three children that he was able to flesh out this idea by watching them closely from birth on.

nBasically, Piaget pointed out that babies and young children were not just like teeny adults who happened to know less; young children were not like empty vases into which knowledge had to be poured. Instead, babies and young children are highly intelligent learners who actively construct theories of the universe (knowledge) and base further knowledge on knowledge they have already learned / constructed.

nBased on his own observations and further testing, Piaget came up with four stages:

n1) Experiences and physical interactions – learning through the senses and by doing experiments with objects, such as touching, dropping, or sucking them. Babies try to touch and taste everything!

2) Language – representing things with words or symbols – and lots of pretend play. For example, a young child might pretend that sticks and leaves are food, a flat rock is a table, and pieces of paper are plates.

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n3) Logic – solving problems in a more adult-like way, applying logic and inductive reasoning to concrete, real-world situations. Older kids begin to use trial-and-error to solve problems, and they can view things from another person’s point of view.

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n4) Abstract reasoning – thinking about thinking, coming up with hypothetical what-if situations, using deductive reasoning. Teens can develop systematic ways of testing ideas and solving problems.

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Piaget was so busy working and teaching at various universities in Europe, as a professor of psychology, sociology, and the philosophy of science, that he was not able to put a lot of time into promoting his published theories. But in the 1960s, Piaget’s ideas became popular and widely known among educators and psychologists.