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 development is a dynamic interplay between assimilation and accommodation.
The child's errors are not simply a lack of knowledge, but a different way of knowing.
The child's development is a process of continuous construction and reconstruction.
The child's understanding of the world is not simply a reflection of reality, but an active interpretation.
The child's development is a journey of discovery and invention.
The child's mind is a laboratory where he constantly tests his hypotheses about the world.
Every time I learn something new, I forget something I already knew. It's a vicious cycle.
Children are not miniature adults. They are miniature aliens, and we are trying to understand their language.
Logic and mathematics are not inventions but discoveries. We are merely uncovering what was always there, like archaeologists of the mind.
The principal goal of education is to create men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.
If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.
The more I study children, the more I realize they are the only true philosophers.
Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them something too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves.
The child, in his egocentrism, is not aware of his own subjectivity. He takes his own point of view as absolute.
What is learned is not retained unless it is understood.
The current state of education is like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it.
Every acquisition of accommodation is a new invention.
The greatest respect an adult can have for a child is to treat him as an equal, not as a lesser being.
Children are born with a thirst for knowledge, and we often manage to quench it with our teaching methods.
The more a child is forced to learn, the less he will understand.
Contemporaries of Jean Piaget
Other Psychologys born within 50 years of Jean Piaget (1896–1980).