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)
The child's thought is egocentric, not selfish.
Learning is an active process of construction, not a passive process of absorption.
The child's moral development progresses from heteronomous to autonomous morality.
The child's understanding of the world is shaped by his actions upon it.
The essence of knowledge is to act, to transform reality.
The child's thinking is qualitative, not quantitative.
The child's social development is intertwined with his cognitive development.
The child's language development reflects his cognitive development.
The child's play is his work.
The child's errors are not simply mistakes, but indicators of his current stage of understanding.
The child's curiosity is a powerful motivator for learning.
The child's development is a spiral, not a linear progression.
The child's understanding of time and space develops gradually.
The child's ability to conserve quantity, number, and volume develops over time.
The child's ability to classify and seriate objects develops gradually.
The child's ability to reason logically develops through stages.
The child's understanding of causality develops from magical thinking to more logical explanations.
The child's development is influenced by both maturation and experience.
The child's development is a continuous process of adaptation to the environment.
The child's development is characterized by periods of equilibrium and disequilibrium.
Contemporaries of Jean Piaget
Other Psychologys born within 50 years of Jean Piaget (1896–1980).