From:
http://www.saddleback.cc.ca.us/AP/hs/humanServices/syllabi/HS-120.html(scroll almost halfway down to "BEHAVIOR FROM MOLLUSKS TO MOPPETS, JEAN PIAGET: 1896-1980")
Re: Jean Piaget's observations/conclusions:
"Unlike Freud, Piaget had no taste for grand theories or empire building. Nor did he have any zest for the cut and thrust of academic infighting. He was, in fact, a rather reserved, quiet personality, a familiar, fatherly figure trudging or bicycling along the streets of Geneva, wearing his blue beret and smoking a meerschaum pipe, eyes ablaze as he picked his way through his latest intellectual problem. He was not much interested in fame, polemics or small talk.
Though he could be remote and cold with adults, he had a remarkable empathy with children. For nearly 60 years he studied them as closely as he once studied mollusks, ferreting out their notions of time, space, numbers and ethics as he sprawled on the ground shooting marbles and playing other games with them. Out of these observations came his challenge to prevailing wisdom about child development. One of his conclusions: "Children not only reasoned differently from adults, but also they had quite different world views, literally different philosophies."
Piaget found that toddlers think like primitive people. The very young believe that the moon follows them when they go for a walk, that dreams come in through the window at night, and that all moving things, including ocean waves fluttering flags, are obviously alive. The young child's notion of justice is also primitive, taking into account only the damage done not the intentions of the offender. For example, a child who breaks three teacups while helping Mother clear the table considers himself more culpable than a child who smashes one teacup in a fit of rage. The clash between the child's objective morality and the parent's subjective one, according to Piaget, is at the heart of much parent-child conflict.
Despite his contributions to both fields, Piaget did not consider himself a psychologist or educator, but a "genetic epistemologies" - a biologist-philosopher asking the question: How does the human organism learn? His answer: partly by nature, partly by nurture. By that, Piaget meant that the child is somehow programmed to master logical thought in predictable developmental stages. But, he added, development depends on vigorous interaction with the environment. Thus, learning is not something poured into a child; it is something a child helps create through his or her own activity. One example: until age five or six, most children thing that six pennies stacked up are quantitatively less than when they are spread in a row. By age seven or eight, almost all children understand that the number of pennies does not change, no matter how they are arranged. The child may have the innate ability to comprehend this new mental picture, but he only learns it through action.
Indeed, in Piaget's view, all experience is organized by intelligence. Every child, he said, constructs and constantly revises his very own model of reality, and does so in a regular sequence. Piaget outlined four stages of mental growth. In the first two years of life, the child is primarily concerned with learning about physical objects; in the next four or five years, he is preoccupied with symbols, in language, dreams and fantasy. From age six or seven to about twelve, the child moves on into the abstract, mastering numbers and relationships and how to reason about them. Finally, from age twelve to 15, the youngster tackles purely logical thought and can think about his own thinking and that of others. For the first time, he can understand double entendre and resonance of aphorism.
Though his ideas stressed inborn processes during learning, Piaget called himself "the man in the middle" on the nature-nurture debate. In the U.S. especially, the prevailing intellectual fashion for years was emphatically pro-nature: environment shapes the person, not heredity, and there are no instincts or other inherent structures. As a result, Piaget was cold-shouldered in many sections of American academia as late as the 1960's. Since then, his work, as well as that of such scholars as Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and Linguist Noam Chomsky, helped persuade skeptics that some form of innate mental structures exists, and the nature side of the argument has gained new respectability.
One common criticism of Piaget is that his work does not lead to any clear vision of how to educate children. Two of his conclusions, however, are clear enough: 1) motivation and rewards are not necessary - the structuctures in the child's mind lead to a kind of spontaneous development, and 2) the teacher plays a limited role. For Piaget,
the child is the real educator, not the teacher."
Another interesting possibility to consider.
Sela
Poll