Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget, the pioneering Swiss philosopher and psychologist, became famous for his theories on child development. A child prodigy, he became interested in the scientific study of nature at an early age. He developed a special fascination for biology, having some of his work published before graduating from high school. When, aged 10, his observations led to questions that could be answered only by access to the university library, Piaget wrote and published some notes on the sighting of an albino sparrow in the hope that this would persuade the librarian to stop treating him like a child. It worked. Piaget was launched on a path that led to his doctorate in zoology and a lifelong conviction that the way to understand anything is to know how it evolves.

Piaget went on to spend much of his professional life listening to and watching children, and poring over reports of researchers who were doing the same. He found, to put it succinctly, that children don’t think like adults. After thousands of interactions with young people often barely old enough to talk, Piaget began to suspect that behind their cute and seemingly illogical utterances were thought processes that had their own kind of order and their own special logic. Albert Einstein, the renowned physicist, deemed this a discovery ‘so simple that only a genius could have thought of it.’

Piaget’s insight opened a new window into the inner workings of the mind. Several new fields of science, among them developmental psychology and cognitive theory, came into being as a result of his research. Although not an educational reformer, he championed a way of thinking about children that provided the foundation for today’s education reform movements. One might say that Piaget was the first to take children’s thinking seriously. Others who shared this respect for children may have fought harder for immediate change in schools, but Piaget’s influence on education remains deeper and more pervasive.

Piaget has been revered by generations of teachers inspired by the belief that children are not empty vessels to be filled with knowledge, as traditional academic thinking had it, but active builders of knowledge – little scientists who are constantly creating and testing their own theories of the world. And while he may not be as famous as Sigmund Freud, Piaget’s contribution to psychology may be longer lasting. As computers and the Internet give children greater autonomy to explore ever larger digital worlds, the ideas he pioneered become ever more relevant.

In the 1940s, working in Alfred Binet’s child-psychology lab in Paris, Piaget noticed that children of the same age, regardless of their background or gender, made comparable errors on true-false intelligence tests. Back in Switzerland, the young scientist began watching children play, scrupulously recording their words and actions as their minds raced to find reasons for why things are the way they are. Piaget recognised that a five-year-old’s beliefs, while not correct by any adult criterion, are not ‘incorrect’ either. They are entirely sensible and coherent within the framework of the child’s ‘way of knowing’. In Piaget’s view, classifying them as ‘true’ or ‘false’ misses the point and shows a lack of respect for the child. What Piaget was after was a theory that could find coherence and ingenuity in the child’s justification, and evidence of a kind of explanatory principle that stands young children in very good stead when they don’t know enough or don’t have enough skill to handle the kind of explanation that grown-ups prefer.

The core of Piaget’s work is his belief that looking carefully at how children acquire knowledge sheds light on how adults think and understand the world. Whether this has, in fact, led to deeper understanding remains, like everything about Piaget, contentious. In recent years, Piaget has been vigorously challenged by the current emphasis on viewing knowledge as an intrinsic property of the brain. Ingenious experiments have demonstrated that newborn infants already have some of the knowledge that Piaget believed children constructed. But for those of us who still see Piaget as the giant in the field of cognitive theory, the disparity between what the baby brings and what the adult has is so immense that the new discoveries do not significantly reduce the gap, only increase the mystery.