73+ Jean Piaget Quotes On Cognitive Development, Play And Child Development

Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist and philosopher known for his work in the area of cognitive development. He is best known for his theory of cognitive development that describes the stages of intellectual development in children from birth to adulthood. He believed that children actively construct knowledge as they interact with their environment, and his research helped shape the field of developmental psychology. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Jean Piaget on cognitive development, play, child development.

Top 10 Jean Piaget Quotes

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do.
4. 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.
5. It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.
6. 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.
7. Only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual.
8. 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.
9. In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning.
10. Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.

Jean Piaget Short Quotes

• Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity.
• To understand is to invent.
• Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process.
• Punishment renders autonomy of conscience impossible.
• 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.
• To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active.
• If mutual respect does derive from unilateral respect, it does so by opposition.
• Experience precedes understanding.
• We learn more when we are compelled to invent.

Jean Piaget Quotes About Play

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

Play is the work of childhood. — Jean Piaget

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

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

Jean Piaget Quotes About Education

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

The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done -- men who are creative, inventive and discoverers. — Jean Piaget

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

Jean Piaget Quotes About Objects

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

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

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

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 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

Jean Piaget Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done-men who are creative, inventive, and discovers. The second goal of education is to form minds which can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered. — 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

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

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

The child who defines a lie as being a "naughty word" knows perfectly well that lying consists in not speaking the truth. He is not, therefore, mistaking one thing for another, he is simply identifying them one with another by what seems to us a quaint extension of the word "lie". — Jean Piaget

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

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

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

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

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

The majority of parents are poor psychologists and give their children the most questionable moral trainings. It is perhaps in this domain that one realized most how keenly how immoral it can be to believe too much in morality, and how much more precious is a little humanity than all the rules in the world. — 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

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

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

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

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

If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society. — 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

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

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

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

The most developed science remains a continual becoming — Jean Piaget

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teaching means creating situations where structures can be discovered. — 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

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

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

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

I could not think without writing. — 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

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

Life Lessons by Jean Piaget

1. Jean Piaget's theories on cognitive development emphasize the importance of actively engaging with the world in order to gain knowledge and understanding.
2. Through his research, Piaget showed that our knowledge is a product of our experiences, and that we must actively seek out new experiences in order to learn and grow.
3. His work also highlights the importance of adapting to changing environments and the need to be flexible in our thinking in order to better understand the world around us.