Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget (August 9, 1896 – September 16, 1980) was a Swiss developmental psychologist, although he preferred the term genetic epistemologist, reflecting his belief that the development of knowledge is based on a biologically determined timetable. He is considered the major figure in developmental psychology in the twentieth century, famous for working out a sequence of stages of cognitive development. His understanding that intellectual development proceeds in an orderly fashion through a sequence of identifiable stages, in a way similar to physical growth, revolutionized our view of the child's mind.

Biography: early life

He was born in Neuchâtel in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. His father, Arthur, was a professor of medieval literature at the University of Neuchâtel. He was a precocious child and his long scientific career began in 1907 at the age of ten with the publication of a short paper on his observations of an albino sparrow. His purpose in publishing this observation was to show the curator of the Neuchâtel Museum of Natural Sciences that he was active in the field so that he might be given permission to work at the museum out of regular hours.

Throughout his school years he developed his interest in biology, particularly mollusks, publishing several papers in professional journals. He became well-known among European zoologists, to the point of being offered a position as curator of a mollusk exhibition, which he had to turn down in order to complete high school.

During these adolescent years Piaget experienced two intellectual "crises." The first, as he put it, was "the problem of religion." His mother, a devout Protestant, encolled him in a course of religious instruction. There he noticed the difficulty of reconciling certain religious dogmas with biology, and the frailty of the proofs of God's existence, although at that time he in no way denied the existence of God. He found in his father's library a work by August Sabatier entitled Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion Based on Psychology and History, which delighted him with the notion of "evolution of dogmas" and sparked in him a passion for philosophy. The second "crisis" occurred when his godfather introduced him to the "creative evolution" of Henri Bergson. This was the first time Piaget had heard philosophy discussed by anyone not a theologian. It was both an emotional and intellectual shock: "I recall one evening of profund revelation. The identification of God with life itself was an idea that stirred me almost to ecstasy because it now enabled me to see in biology the explanation of all things and of the mind itself" (Evans, p.111). Thus, Piaget came to see the epistemological problem (the problem of knowing) in a new light, and decided to dedicate his life to the biological explanation of knowledge.

He received a Ph.D. in natural science from the University of Neuchâtel in 1918. During this time, he published two philosophical essays entitled "La Mission de l'Idée" (The Mission of the Idea) and "Recherche" {The Quest}, which showed the direction of his thinking at the time, although he dismissed them as adolescent thinking. At this time, however, he recognized the need for something other than philosophy in his quest, namely psychology. He studed briefly at the University of Zürich under prominent psychologists including Karl Jung, and his interest in psychoanalysis can be dated to this period.

He then moved from Switzerland to France where he continued his studies of psychology and philosophy at the Sorbonne, and was fortunate to meet Theodore Simon and work with him at the school for boys established by Alfred Binet, the developer of the Binet intelligence test. Here he found that children's wrong answers to problems revealed hitherto unknown aspects of their reasoning. Thus began his experimental research into children's thinking. The following is an example of this type of questioning (Gruber and Vonèche, p.xxi), which led Piaget to formulate a period of childhood egocentrism:

Adult: Does the moon move or not?
Child (age 7): When we go, it goes.
Adult: What makes it move?
Child: We do.
Adult: How?
Child: When we walk. It goes by itself.

At this point Piaget formed his plan: first he would study children's thinking and intelligence as they emerged in the first few years of life; then he would construct a theory of structures of intelligence; and finally he would be able to formulate a psychological and biological epistemology. In 1921, he returned to Switzerland as director of the Rousseau Institute in Geneva.

In 1923, he married Valentine Châtenay, and they had three children, Jacqueline, Lucienne, and Laurent, whose development he studied from infancy.

The stages of cognitive development

Piaget became a professor of psychology at the University of Geneva from 1929 to 1975 and is best known for organizing cognitive development into a series of stages – the levels of development corresponding to infancy, early childhood, later childhood, and adolescence. These four stages are called the Sensorimotor stage, which occurs from birth to age two, (children experience through their senses), the Preoperational stage, which occurs from ages two to seven (motor skills are acquired), the Concrete Operational stage, which occurs from ages seven to eleven (children think logically about concrete events), and the Formal Operational stage, which occurs after age eleven (abstract reasoning is developed here). Advancement through these levels occurs through the interaction of biological factors and experience, through a mechanism he called "equilibration." He believed that children (and indeed adults) are continually generating theories about the external world (which are kept or dismissed depending on whether we see them working in practice).

Piaget's view of the child's mind

Piaget's research was focussed on the goal of discovering how knowledge develops. He viewed children as little philosophers and scientists building their own individual theories of knowledge based on logical structures that develop over time and through experience. Thus, children of different ages view the world in entirely different ways from adults.

Influence

During his long academic career which spanned over seven decades Piaget wrote more than sixty books and several hundred articles. His theory of cognitive development has proved influential, notably on the work of Lev Vygotsky and of Lawrence Kohlberg. Among others, the philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas has incorporated it into his work, most notably in The Theory of Communicative Action. Piaget also had a considerable impact in the field of computer science and artificial intelligence. Seymour Papert used Piaget's work while developing the Logo programming language. Alan Kay used Piaget's theories as the basis for the Dynabook programming system concept, which was first discussed within the confines of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or Xerox PARC. These discussions led to the development of the Alto prototype, which explored for the first time all the elements of the graphical user interface (GUI), and influenced the creation of user interfaces in the 1980's and beyond. The philosopher Thomas Kuhn credited Piaget's work in helping him understanding the transition between modes of thought which characterised his theory of paradigm shifts.

Piaget has had a substantial impact on approaches to education. In Conversations with Jean Piaget, he says: "Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society... But for me, education means making creators... You have to make inventors, innovators, not conformists." (Bringuier, p.132).

Major works and achievements

Single "best read"

• Bringuier, Jean-Claude, Conversations with Jean Piaget, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Major works (English translation)

• Piaget, J. (1928). Judgment and Reasoning in the Child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Piaget, J. (1932). The Moral Judgment of the Child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Piaget, J. (1951). Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. London: Heinemann.
• Piaget, J. (1952). Origins of Intelligence in Children. New York: International Universities Press.
• Piaget, J. (1954). Construction of Reality in the Child. New York: Basic Books.
• Inhelder, B. and J. Piaget (1958). The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence. New York: Basic Books.
• Piaget, J. (1970). Structuralism. New York: Harper & Row.
• Piaget, J. (1971). Biology and Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Piaget, J. (1983). Piaget's theory. In P. Mussen (ed). Handbook of Child Psychology. 4th edition. Vol. 1. New York: Wiley.
• Piaget, J. (1995). Sociological Studies. London: Routledge.
• Piaget, J. (2000). Commentary on Vygotsky. New Ideas in Psychology, 18, 241-59.
• Piaget, J. (2001). Studies in Reflecting Abstraction. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.

Appointments

• 1921-25 Research Director, Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Geneva
• 1925-29 Professor of Psychology, Sociology and the Philosophy of Science, University of Neuchâtel
• 1929-39 Professor of the History of Scientific Thought, University of Geneva
• 1929-67 Director, International Bureau of Education, Geneva
• 1932-71 Director, Institute of Educational Sciences, University of Geneva
• 1938-51 Professor of Experimental Psychology and Sociology, University of Lausanne
• 1939-51 Professor of Sociology, University of Geneva
• 1940-71 Professor of Experimental Psychology, University of Geneva
• 1952-64 Professor of Genetic Psychology, Sorbonne, Paris
• 1955-80 Director, International Centre for Genetic Epistemology, Geneva
• 1971-80 Emeritus Professor, University of Geneva

External links

• Jean Piaget Archives a private foundation at the University of Geneva.
• Jean Piaget Society Society for the Study of Knowledge and Development (USA).

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Bringuier, Jean-Claude, Conversations with Jean Piaget, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• Evans, Richard I., Jean Piaget: The Man and His Ideas, Eleanor Duckworth (trans.), New York, NY: Dutton, 1973.
• Gruber, Howard E. and Jacques J. Vonèche (eds), The Essential Piaget, Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc, 1995.
• Smith, Leslie, "Jean Piaget". In N. Sheehy, A. Chapman. W. Conroy (eds), Biographical Dictionary of Psychology. London: Routledge, 1997.
• Smith, Leslie, "Jean Piaget". In J. A. Palmer (ed) 50 Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present. London: Routledge, 2001.
• Vander Goot, Mary, Piaget as a Visionary Thinker, Bristol, IN: Wyndham Hall Press, 1985.

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Comments

This is an unfinished work in progress.—Jennifer Tanabe 15:20, 20 Sep 2005 (CDT)