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)
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 mental copy of it. To know an object is to act on it.
The principal goal of education is to create men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done.
The child, in his egocentricity, is not aware of the existence of other points of view.
The child's thought is not merely a miniature adult thought; it is qualitatively different.
The most powerful learning occurs when children are actively engaged in constructing their own understanding.
Assimilation and accommodation are the two invariant functions of intelligence.
The development of knowledge is a continuous construction of new structures.
There is no knowledge without action.
The child's moral reasoning develops in stages, from heteronomous to autonomous morality.
The sensorimotor stage is characterized by the absence of symbolic thought.
Object permanence is not innate but is constructed through experience.
The preoperational child is characterized by egocentrism and centration.
Conservation is a key achievement of the concrete operational stage.
Formal operational thought allows for abstract reasoning and hypothetical-deductive thinking.
The role of the teacher is not to transmit knowledge, but to facilitate the child's own construction of knowledge.
Learning is an active process of construction rather than a passive reception of information.
Children's errors are not simply mistakes, but indicators of their current stage of thinking.
The child's understanding of the world is fundamentally different from that of an adult.
Language is not the source of thought, but rather a tool for its expression and development.
The development of logical thought is rooted in the child's actions on objects.
Contemporaries of Jean Piaget
Other Psychologys born within 50 years of Jean Piaget (1896–1980).