Who Piaget Was
Jean Piaget: Introduction
Life and discipline
- Born 1896, died 1980.
- Swiss biologist who became a developmental psychologist and philosopher.
- Combination of biology, psychology, and philosophy across one career.
- Held progressive philosophical sympathies.
Genetic epistemology
- Epistemological questions can be answered best by looking at the genetic development of knowledge in real children.
- The project: discover the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, from elementary forms up through scientific knowledge.
His warning
Only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent or gradual.
Central concern
The role of maturity (simply growing up) in children’s increasing capacity to understand their world.
Jean Piaget did not set out to be an educational theorist. He was a biologist who became a developmental psychologist because he wanted to know how human knowledge actually develops in real human beings. The decades of careful empirical work that followed produced the most influential account of child cognitive development in the twentieth century, and the account reshaped almost every modern approach to early-childhood and primary education.
A biologist who became a psychologist
Jean Piaget was born in 1896 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and died in 1980. The dates span nearly the whole twentieth century, and Piaget’s work covers most of that span. He published his first scientific paper at the age of ten, on a partly albino sparrow he had observed in a public park. He completed his doctorate in biology at twenty-two. By the time he was thirty he was already widely known for his work on child psychology, and the work continued at high productivity for another fifty years.
The unusual feature of Piaget’s career is the combination of disciplines he held together. He started in biology, the science of living things; moved into psychology, the study of mind; and ended up engaging with philosophy, the analysis of the basic structures of knowledge. The three were not separate stages for him. He treated them as connected aspects of one project: understanding how human beings, who are biological organisms, develop the cognitive capacities that produce knowledge.
He held progressive philosophical sympathies throughout his career. His own work influenced progressive education enormously, even though Piaget himself was primarily a researcher rather than an educational theorist. The progressive movement could point to Piaget’s empirical results to support its theoretical claims about how children actually learn. The link between Piaget’s research and progressive practice has been one of the most consequential intellectual relationships of twentieth-century education.
A biographical note on a typographical error worth flagging: some printed sources, including some Pakistani educational materials, give Piaget’s birth year as 1986, which is impossible. The correct year is 1896. The error is a typo that has been propagated through copying, and a student should know to check.
Biology, psychology, and philosophy held together as connected aspects of one project
Piaget started in biology, the science of living things, and moved into psychology, the study of mind, and then philosophy, the analysis of basic knowledge structures. The three were not separate stages. He treated them as connected aspects of understanding how human beings, who are biological organisms, develop the cognitive capacities that produce knowledge. The biological mode of inquiry (observation across time, careful attention to specific sequences) gave his work empirical weight.
Genetic epistemology
Piaget called his philosophical project genetic epistemology. The word genetic here does not mean DNA; it comes from the Greek genesis, meaning origin or coming-into-being. Genetic epistemology is the study of the origin of knowledge in the developing human being.
The basic idea: traditional epistemology asks what knowledge is and how it is justified. Genetic epistemology asks how knowledge actually develops in a real human being from infancy through adulthood. The two projects are connected. If we want to understand what knowledge really is, Piaget argues, we have to understand how it actually comes into being in the people who have it. The abstract question about knowledge cannot be settled without the concrete question about how knowledge develops.
In his own words: what genetic epistemology proposes is discovering the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, since its elementary forms, following to the next levels, including also the scientific knowledge. The project is to trace knowledge from its earliest infant forms (the baby’s first sensorimotor understanding of its body and the world it touches) through the increasingly sophisticated forms (early symbolic thought, concrete reasoning, abstract formal thought) all the way to mature scientific knowledge.
The implication is that mature scientific knowledge is not a separate thing from the early infant forms; it is the same thing in a later stage of development. The infant’s grasp of object permanence (the realisation that objects continue to exist when out of sight) is, on Piaget’s account, the earliest form of the same cognitive structure that the adult scientist uses when they assume that an electron continues to exist between observations. The structure has matured enormously across the years, but the continuity is real.
Piaget’s project was therefore deeply ambitious. He was not trying to describe what children think; he was trying to use the description to ground a complete theory of how human knowledge works. The educational implications followed almost as a side-effect of the larger project, but the side-effect has turned out to be the most consequential part of his work in practice.
The study of how knowledge actually develops in human beings, used to ground a complete theory of how human knowledge works
The word genetic comes from the Greek genesis, meaning origin. Genetic epistemology asks how knowledge develops from infancy through adulthood and uses the answer to address the traditional epistemological questions about what knowledge is and how it is justified. The implication is that mature scientific knowledge is the same thing as early infant cognition in a later stage of development. The continuity from infant object permanence to adult scientific reasoning is real.
Maturity and understanding
Piaget’s central concern was the role of maturity in children’s increasing capacity to understand their world. The word maturity means something specific here. It means simply growing up: the gradual development of the cognitive structures that allow more sophisticated understanding. Maturity is not about how much information the child has been taught; it is about what cognitive operations the child is currently capable of performing.
A young child has not yet matured into the cognitive operations that an older child can perform. This is not a failure on the young child’s part; it is the normal state of cognitive development. Asking a young child to perform operations they have not yet matured into is asking them to do something they literally cannot do, no matter how hard they try or how good the teaching is.
The implication for education is large and is what made Piaget famous in the educational world. A school that ignores the child’s current cognitive maturity will fail. A teacher who tries to teach a four-year-old something that requires concrete operational thinking (which usually emerges around age seven) is wasting their time at best and damaging the child at worst. The teacher needs to know what stage the child is at and pitch the teaching to that stage.
This is what adaptation of instruction to the learner’s developmental level means in Piaget. It is not the vague meeting students where they are of casual modern educational talk; it is a specific empirical claim about cognitive stages and what each stage can do.
The deeper warning Piaget gives is political. He wrote in 1934: only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent or gradual. The line places the educational work in its largest context. Piaget had seen, by 1934, the rise of European fascism and the slow erosion of democratic institutions. He thought the schools were where the question of whether democratic life would survive was being decided, one student at a time. The line is grim but the work that followed it was hopeful: get the schools right and the wider society has a chance.
Simply growing up: the gradual development of the cognitive structures that allow more sophisticated understanding
Maturity is not about how much information the child has been taught; it is about what cognitive operations the child is currently capable of performing. A young child has not yet matured into the operations an older child can perform; asking them to do operations they have not yet matured into is asking them to do something they literally cannot do. The implication for education: a school that ignores the child’s current cognitive maturity will fail, no matter how good the teaching.
How was this article?