Jean Piaget
Pioneer of developmental psychology
Most quoted
"The child who defines a lie as 'a naughty word' knows perfectly well that lying consists of not speaking the truth. He is not, therefore, mistaking one thing for another; he is simply identifying them one with another by what seems to us a quaint extension of the word lie."
— from The Moral Judgment of the Child, 1932
"The more the schemata are differentiated, the smaller the gap between the new and the familiar becomes, so that novelty, instead of constituting an annoyance avoided by the subject, becomes a problem and invites searching."
— from The Origins of Intelligence in Children, 1936
"Knowledge is not a copy of reality. To know an object, to know an event, is not simply to look at it and record it in a mental image or even to make a perceptual copy of it. To know an object is to act on it."
— from Speech at UNESCO, 'Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child', 1964
All quotes by Jean Piaget (326)
Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do.
The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done.
Children are not empty vessels to be filled, but rather active builders of knowledge.
Knowledge is not a copy of reality. To know an object, to know an event, is not simply to look at it and record it in a mental image or even to make a perceptual copy of it. To know is to act on it.
The child has his own way of thinking and feeling, and it is not simply a miniature adult's.
Play is the answer to how anything new comes about.
Every time we teach a child something, we prevent him from inventing it himself.
The current state of knowledge is a moment in history, changing as rapidly as the speed of communication.
The more the child is allowed to do for himself, the more he will learn.
The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things.
Logic and mathematics are not innate, but are constructed by the child through interaction with the environment.
Children require long periods of uninterrupted play and exploration.
The child's mind is a blank slate, but it is a slate that is constantly being written on by the child himself.
Assimilation and accommodation are the two sides of the same coin, the two poles of the same process.
To understand is to invent.
The most important function of education at every level is to form the reasoning mind.
The child constructs his own reality.
The development of knowledge is a progressive construction of logically embedded structures succeeding each other by a process of inclusion of lower mechanisms into higher ones.
The child is a little scientist, constantly experimenting and testing his hypotheses about the world.
The development of intelligence is a continuous process of organization and reorganization of structures.
Contemporaries of Jean Piaget
Other Psychologys born within 50 years of Jean Piaget (1896–1980).