Jean Piaget Quotes

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.

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

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.

Play is the work of childhood.

Children require long, uniterrupted periods of play and exploration

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.

Play is the answer to how anything new comes about.

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

Teaching means creating situations where structures can be discovered.

Experience precedes understanding.

What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual.

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.

Everytime we teach a child something, we prevent him from inventing it himself.

We learn more when we are compelled to invent.

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.

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

Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.

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.

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

Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity.

To understand is to invent.

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

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

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

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

Punishment renders autonomy of conscience impossible.

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

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.

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

I could not think without writing.

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

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

The most developed science remains a continual becoming

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.