57 Piaget quotes about childhood and learning

Jean Piaget was a constructivist psychologist well known in the fields of child psychology and learning. His studies and research were extremely influential in both developmental psychology and modern pedagogy. Piaget’s phrases are a clear example of his passion for the study of development.

Piaget had children from whom he learned a lot. Through detailed observation of his growth, he developed a theory of intelligence and established certain stages of childhood cognitive development. In this article we have selected 57 Piaget phrases that tell us about the two topics that he was most passionate about: childhood and learning. Let’s dig deeper.

1. The importance of not always doing the same thing

What’s the point of repeating the same thing? Piaget launches a very big criticism of the educational system with this phrase. Something that could apply even today. In how many schools is creativity encouraged? In very few, the majority focus on a syllabus and the assessment of exam grades to determine the level of the students.

Young people sit for many hours listening to their boring teachers. The dynamic is the same as always. Do exercises, learn the syllabus by heart and develop it in the exam. There is no learning, there is no criticism, there is no reasoning, no one questions anything. Is this really what we want?

2. The true meaning of education

Since we were little we hear things like “stop jumping” or “behave like a big kid.”. They don’t even let us be children. They push us to quickly become the stereotype of the adult that prevails in a society that lives at high speed through automatism.

All of this limits us, pigeonholes us and prevents us from standing out. As Piaget says, Education should foster creative adults, full of new and non-conformist ideas.. However, every day we observe the opposite.

3. Children can discover new things to us

This is one of Piaget’s phrases that most reflects his interest in the world of children and, above all, his great admiration for them. Piaget knew that thanks to children they can learn new things, even if we are not aware of it.

Children are not yet contaminated by society. They are free, creative, inventors and curious. But as we grow we lose that interest in discovering the world and we sink into a series of paradigms that limit and restrict us. Perhaps, we should learn a little from the little ones.

4. The teacher is not a speaker

Many teachers come to their classes, explain the subject, send exercises home and go to the next classroom. This is not the true role of a teacher. Their role should be more active and they should be more involved in stimulating their students..

Piaget says it in a very wise way explaining that The teacher should promote the initiative of his students and enhance their curiosity. This is how true learning is achieved.

5. Playing is children’s work

This is another of Piaget’s phrases that refers to childhood and the importance of play for child development. That is why it is so important to encourage it in the little ones instead of imposing restrictions. Playing is precisely the work of children. Through the game a whole world of possibilities begins to appear both on an individual and social level.

6. Let children discover the world

We adults already know everything, but the little ones don’t. That’s why, It is not necessary to explain absolutely everything. You have to give room to allow them to discover the world for themselves, to ask questions and experiment in their own way.

7. Stay partly like a child

Do you want to enhance your creativity? Do you want to increase your inventive capacity? So, stay partly like a child. Because these are free and their thoughts are not deformed or contaminated by adult society.

Other Piaget phrases about childhood and learning

These 7 Piaget phrases are those that deserve more reflection, so they have a broader development. However, this author also left other famous phrases that are self-explanatory. Let’s see a catalog of them:

Scientific thinking, then, is not momentary, it is not a static instance, but it is a process. On the one hand, there are individual actions, such as pulling, pushing, touching, rubbing. These are those individual actions that give rise most of the time to the abstraction of objects. Scientific knowledge is constantly evolving; who finds himself changed from one day to the next Look, I have no opinion in pedagogy. The problem of education greatly interests me, since it is my impression that there is much to reform and transform, but I think that the role of the psychologist consists above all of providing facts that pedagogy can use, and not of putting himself in his place to give advice.Look, I have no opinion on pedagogy. The problem of education greatly interests me, since it is my impression that there is much to reform and transform, but I think that the role of the psychologist consists above all of providing facts that pedagogy can use, and not of putting himself in his place to give advice. Every acquisition accommodation becomes material for assimilation, but assimilation always resists new accommodations. Knowledge is, therefore, a system of transformations that become progressively adequate. Our problem, from the point of view of psychology and from the point of view of genetic epistemology, is to explain how the transition is made from a lower level of knowledge to a level that appears to be higher. I have always detested any deviation from reality, an attitude that I relate to my poor mental health. mother.What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see. I could not think without writing. What genetic epistemology proposes is to discover the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, from their elementary forms, continuing to the next levels, also including scientific knowledge. Relationships between parents and children are, without a doubt, not only those of restriction. There is spontaneous mutual affection, which ranges from first asking the child for acts of generosity and even sacrifice, to very moving manifestations that are in no way prescribed.If an individual is intellectually passive, he will not be morally free.Knowledge of the outside world begins with an immediate use of things, while knowledge of oneself is stopped by this purely practical and utilitarian contact. Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do. What role would they have then in this school? books and manuals? The ideal school would not have mandatory manuals for students, but only reference works that would be used freely… the only indispensable manuals are those used by the teacher. To express the same idea in another way, I believe that human knowledge is essentially active.Logic and mathematics are nothing more than specialized linguistic structures.It is with children that we have the best opportunity to study the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, among other things. Understanding is inventing. Children have a real understanding of what they only invent themselves, and every time we try to teach them something too quickly, we prevent them from reinventing themselves. Reflective abstraction is not based on individual actions, but on coordinated actions. The main goal of education is to create people capable of doing new things, and not simply repeat what other generations did. The second objective of education is to form minds that can be critical, that can verify and not accept everything that is offered to them. The great danger today is the slogans, collective opinions, the trends and made of thought. We have to be able to oppose ourselves individually, to criticize, to distinguish between what is good and what is not. Knowledge cannot be a copy, since it is always a relationship between subject and object. This does not mean that logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge. Knowing reality involves building systems in continuous transformation that correspond, more or less, to reality. From then on, the universe is built on a set of permanent objects connected by causal relationships that are independent of the subject and are placed in the time and space of the subject. A learned truth is nothing more than a half-learned truth, while the entire truth must be conquered, reconstructed or rediscovered by the student himself.Intelligence, the most plastic and at the same time the most permanent structural balance of behavior, is essentially a system of vital operations.Every psychological explanation, sooner or later, ends up resting on logic or biology. To develop human intelligence it is essential to know mathematical logic. We must start from this dual character of intelligence as something biological and logical at the same time. To explain well psychological phenomenon it is necessary to study its line of formation. There are many similar aspects between the development of knowledge in a child, on the one hand, and the development of knowledge in the scientific world on the other. Human knowledge is always an assimilation or a interpretation. The structure is the source of the deductive capacity. If knowledge were innate then it would be present in babies. The problems are resolved according to…