Jean Piaget Quotes & Sayings

The current state of knowledge is a moment in history, changing just as rapidly as the state of knowledge in the past has ever changed and, in many instances, more rapidly. — Jean Piaget

If a baby really has no awareness of himself and is totally thing-directed and at the same time all his states of mind are projected onto things, our second paradox makes sense: on the one hand, thought in babies can be viewed as pure accommodation or exploratory movements, but on the other this very same thought is only one, long, completely autistic waking dream. — Jean Piaget

Chance ... in the accommodation peculiar to sensorimotor intelligence, plays the same role as in scientific discovery. It is only useful to the genius and its revelations remain meaningless to the unskilled. — Jean Piaget

To accustom the infant to get out of its own difficulties or to calm it by rocking it may be to lay the foundations of a good or of a bad disposition. — Jean Piaget

The more we try to improve our schools, the heavier the teaching task becomes; and the better our teaching methods the more difficult they are to apply. — Jean Piaget

During the first few months of an infant's life, its manner of taking the breast, of laying its head on the pillow, etc., becomes crystallized into imperative habits. This is why education must begin in the cradle. — Jean Piaget

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 is judged to be higher. — Jean Piaget

Play is the work of childhood. — Jean Piaget

The essential functions of the mind consist in understanding and in inventing, in other words, in building up structures by structuring reality. — Jean Piaget

We learn more when we are compelled to invent. — Jean Piaget

Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand, that which we allow him to discover for himself will remain with him visible for the rest of his life. — Jean Piaget

Scientific knowledge is in perpetual evolution; it finds itself changed from one day to the next. — Jean Piaget

Children should be able to do their own experimenting and their own research. Teachers, of course, can guide them by providing appropriate materials, but the essential thing is that in order for a child to understand something, he must construct it himself, he must re-invent it. Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand that which we allow him to discover by himself will remain with him visibly for the rest of his life. — Jean Piaget

I could not think without writing. — Jean Piaget

Egocentrism appears to us as a form of behavior intermediate between purely individual and socialized behavior. — Jean Piaget

The main functions of intelligence, that of inventing solutions and that of verifying them, do not necessarily involve one another. The first partakes of imagination; the second alone is properly logical. — Jean Piaget

What the 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. — Jean Piaget

On the one hand, there are individual actions such as throwing, pushing, touching, rubbing. It is these individual actions that give rise most of the time to abstraction from objects. — Jean Piaget

Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves. — Jean Piaget

Knowledge is not predetermined by heredity; it is not predetermined in the things around us - in knowing things around him the subject always adds to them. — Jean Piaget

Every acquisition of accommodation becomes material for assimilation, but assimilation always resists new accommodations. — Jean Piaget

Everyone knows that at the age of 11-12, children have a marked impulse to form themselves into groups and that the respect paid to the rules and regulations of their play constitutes an important feature of this social life. — Jean Piaget

When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself. — Jean Piaget

The self thus becomes aware of itself, at least in its practical action, and discovers itself as a cause among other causes and as an object subject to the same laws as other objects. — Jean Piaget

Childish egocentrism is, in its essence, an inability to differentiate between the ego and the social environment. — Jean Piaget

For the fundamental fact of human psychology is that society, instead of remaining almost entirely inside the individual organism as in the case of animals prompted by their instincts, becomes crystallized almost entirely outside the individuals. In other words, social rules, as Durkheim has so powerfully shown, whether they be linguistic, moral, religious, or legal, etc., cannot be constituted, transmitted or preserved by means of an internal biological heredity, but only through the external pressure exercised by individuals upon each other. — Jean Piaget

There is little mysticism without an element of transcendence, and conversely, there is no transcendence without a certain degree of egocentrism. It may be that the genesis of these experiences is to be sought in the unique situation of the very young child in relation to adults. The theory of the filial origin of the religious sense seems to us singularly convincing in this connection. — Jean Piaget

Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process. — Jean Piaget

Before playing with his equals, the child is influenced by his parents. He is subjected from his cradle to a multiplicity of regulations, and even before language he becomes conscious of certain obligations. — Jean Piaget

For someone who constantly comes across this problem in the course of his professional activities, the question whether philosophy has the status of a "wisdom" or of a form of "knowledge" peculiar to itself is no longer an unnecessary or simply a theoretical problem; it is a vital question, since it affects the success or failure of thousands of scholars. — Jean Piaget

I always like to think on a problem before reading about it. — Jean Piaget

Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions. — Jean Piaget

In other words, knowledge of the external world begins with an immediate utilisation of things, whereas knowledge of self is stopped by this purely practical and utilitarian contact. — Jean Piaget

Logical reasoning is an argument which we have with ourselves and which reproduces internally the features of a real argument. — Jean Piaget

As far as the game of marbles is concerned, there is therefore no contradiction between the egocentric practice of games and the mystical respect entertained for rules. This respect is the mark of a mentality fashioned, not by free cooperation between equals, but by adult constraint. — Jean Piaget

What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see. — Jean Piaget

Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what is already known? Or should we try to develop creative and innovative minds, capable of discovery from the preschool age on, throughout life? — Jean Piaget

Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely. — Jean Piaget

I engage my subjects in conversation, patterned after psychiatric questioning, with the aim of discovering something about the reasoning underlying their right but especially their wrong answers. — Jean Piaget

From this time on, the universe is built up into an aggregate of permanent objects connected by causal relations that are independent of the subject and are placed in objective space and time. — Jean Piaget

How much more precious is a little humanity than all the rules in the world. — Jean Piaget

Play is the answer to how anything new comes about. — Jean Piaget

During the earliest stages of thought, accommodation remains on the surface of physical as well as social experience. — Jean Piaget

To reason logically is so to link one's propositions that each should contain the reason for the one succeeding it, and should itself be demonstrated by the one preceding it. Or at any rate, whatever the order adopted in the construction of one's own exposition, it is to demonstrate judgments by each other. — Jean Piaget

The need to speak the truth and even to seek it for oneself is only conceivable in so far as the individual thinks and acts as one of a society, and not of any society (for it is just the constraining relations between superior and inferior that often drive the latter to prevarication) but of a society founded on reciprocity and mutual respect, and therefore on cooperation. — Jean Piaget

Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures. — Jean Piaget

The discussion of the game of marbles seems to have led us into rather deep waters. But in the eyes of children the history of the game of marbles has quite as much importance as the history of religion or of forms of government. It Is a history, moreover, that is magnificently spontaneous; and it was therefore perhaps not entirely useless to seek to throw light on the child's judgment of moral value by a preliminary study of the social behaviour of children amongst themselves. — Jean Piaget

The child is a realist in every domain of thought, and it is therefore natural that in the moral sphere he should lay more stress on the external, tangible element than on the hidden motive. — Jean Piaget

Much research in psychology has been more concerned with how large groups of people behave than about the particular ways in which each individual person thinks ... too statistical. I find this disappointing because, in my view of the history of psychology, far more was learned, for example, when Jean Piaget spent several years observing the ways that three children developed, or when Sigmund Freud took several years to examine the thinking of a rather small number of patients. — Jean Piaget

To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active. — Jean Piaget

Teaching means creating situations where structures can be discovered. — Jean Piaget

Children require long, uniterrupted periods of play and exploration — Jean Piaget

It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth. — Jean Piaget

Mixture of assimilation to earlier schemas and adaptation to the actual conditions of the situation is what defines motor intelligence. But and this is where rules come into existence as soon as a balance is established between adaptation and assimilation, the course of conduct adopted becomes crystallized and ritualized. New schemas are even established which the child looks for and retains with care, as though they were obligatory or charged with efficacy. — Jean Piaget

The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense. — Jean Piaget

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered. — Jean Piaget

At one time, many philosophers held that faultless "laws of thought" were somehow inherent, a priori, in the very nature of mind. This belief was twice shaken in the past century; first when Russell and his successors showed how the logic men employ can be defective, and later when Freud and Piaget started to reveal the tortuous ways in which our minds actually develop. — Jean Piaget

Punishment renders autonomy of conscience impossible. — Jean Piaget

All morality consists in a system of rules, and the essence of all morality is to be sought for in the respect which the individual acquires for these rules. — Jean Piaget

With regard to moral rules, the child submits more or less completely in intention to the rules laid down for him, but these, remaining, as it were, external to the subject's conscience, do not really transform his conduct. — Jean Piaget

I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother's poor mental health. — Jean Piaget

Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures. — Jean Piaget

The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things. — Jean Piaget

To understand is to invent. — Jean Piaget

Play is the answer to the question, 'How does anything new come about?' — Jean Piaget

Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity. — Jean Piaget

What is desired is that the teacher ceased being a lecturer, satisfied with transmitting ready-made solutions. His role should rather be that of a mentor stimulating initiative and research. — Jean Piaget

Every psychological explanation comes sooner or later to lean either on biology or on logic (or on sociology, but this in turn leads to the same alternatives). — Jean Piaget

Before games are played in common, no rules in the proper sense can come into existence. Regularities and ritualized schemas are already there, but these rites, being the work of the individual, cannot call forth that submission to something superior to the self which characterizes the appearance of any rule. — Jean Piaget

In certain circumstances where he experiments in new types of conduct by cooperating with his equals, the child is already an adult. There is an adult in every child and a child in every adult ... There exist in the child certain attitudes and beliefs which intellectual development will more and more tend to eliminate: there are others which will acquire more and more importance. The later are not derived from the former but are partly antagonistic to them. — Jean Piaget

If logic itself is created rather than being inborn, it follows that the first task of education is to form reasoning. — Jean Piaget

It is as his own mind comes into contact with others that truth will begin to acquire value in the child's eyes and will consequently become a moral demand that can be made upon him. As long as the child remains egocentric, truth as such will fail to interest him and he will see no harm in transposing facts in accordance with his desires. — Jean Piaget

If mutual respect does derive from unilateral respect, it does so by opposition. — Jean Piaget

In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning. — Jean Piaget

It was while teaching philosophy that I saw how easily one can say ... what one wants to say ... In fact, I became particularly aware if the dangers of speculation ... It's so much easier than digging out the facts. You sit in your office and build a system. But with my training in biology, I felt this kind of undertaking precarious. — Jean Piaget

How can we, with our adult minds, know what will be interesting? If you follow the child ... you can find out something new ... — Jean Piaget

I am convinced that there is no sort of boundary between the living and the mental or between the biological and the psychological. From the moment an organism takes account of a previous experience and adapts to a new situation, that very much resembles psychology. — Jean Piaget

Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society ... but for me and no one else, education means making creators ... You have to make inventors, innovators ... not conformists — Jean Piaget

Children's games constitute the most admirable social institutions. The game of marbles, for instance, as played by boys, contains an extremely complex system of rules - that is to say, a code of laws, a jurisprudence of its own. — Jean Piaget

The most developed science remains a continual becoming — Jean Piaget

One of the most striking things one finds about the child under 7-8 is his extreme assurance on all subjects. — Jean Piaget

This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge. — Jean Piaget

The child of three or four is saturated with adult rules. His universe is dominated by the idea that things are as they ought to be, that everyone's actions conform to laws that are both physical and moral - in a word, that there is a Universal Order. — Jean Piaget

From the moral as from the intellectual point of view, the child is born neither good nor bad but master of his destiny. — Jean Piaget

Accommodation of mental structures to reality implies the existence of assimilatory schemata apart from which any structure would be impossible. — Jean Piaget

Moral autonomy appears when the mind regards as necessary an ideal that is independent of all external pressures. — Jean Piaget

True interest appears when the self identifies itself with ideas or objects, when it finds in them a means of expression and they become a necessary form of fuel for its activity. — Jean Piaget

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. — Jean Piaget

The relations between parents and children are certainly not only those of constraint. There is spontaneous mutual affection, which from the first prompts the child to acts of generosity and even of self-sacrifice, to very touching demonstrations which are in no way prescribed. And here no doubt is the starting point for that morality of good which we shall see developing alongside of the morality of right or duty, and which in some persons completely replaces it. — Jean Piaget

As you know, Bergson pointed out that there is no such thing as disorder but rather two sorts of order, geometric and living. — Jean Piaget

The practice of narrative and argument does not lead to invention, but it compels a certain coherence of thought. — Jean Piaget

Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do. — Jean Piaget

Logical activity is not the whole of intelligence. One can be intelligent without being particularly logical. — Jean Piaget

During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions. — Jean Piaget

The child often sees only what he already knows. He projects the whole of his verbal thought into things. He sees mountains as built by men, rivers as dug out with spades, the sun and moon as following us on our walks. — Jean Piaget

Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality. — Jean Piaget