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 development of knowledge is a progressive construction of increasingly adequate structures.
The child constructs his knowledge through action.
The child is a little scientist, constantly experimenting and constructing his understanding of the world.
The child's conception of the world is not a miniature adult conception, but a qualitatively different one.
The development of intelligence is a continuous process of organization and adaptation.
The child's moral judgment develops from heteronomous (rule-bound) to autonomous (principled).
The function of education is to help children discover things for themselves.
Learning is an active process of construction, not a passive reception of information.
The child's understanding of causality evolves from magical thinking to logical reasoning.
The development of language is closely intertwined with the development of thought.
The true logic of the child is not the logic of the adult.
The child's conception of time and space is constructed through his actions and experiences.
The development of intelligence is a process of equilibration, where the child constantly seeks to balance assimilation and accommodation.
The child's understanding of conservation (e.g., of mass, number) marks a significant cognitive advance.
Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to think as we do.
The child is the father of the man.
The child's activity is the primary source of his knowledge.
The development of knowledge is a spiral process, not a linear one.
The child's errors are not simply mistakes, but windows into his thinking.
The aim of education should be to teach us how to think, rather than what to think.
Contemporaries of Jean Piaget
Other Psychologys born within 50 years of Jean Piaget (1896–1980).