jean piaget, para principiantes

adriana serulnicov and rodrigo suarez
I must have purchased this book in the latter half of 2002, during a period of time when I taught English in Latinamerica, but was almost more interested in subjects on the periphery of education, like instructional theory.  Since after that time, I immediately delved into computer science, those interests largely fell away.  Most likely this book sat on my shelves for almost thirteen years, and there is no evidence that I ever attempted to read it.

Why does this book exist on my shelf?  While teaching in Mississippi, I faintly recall studying or reading about his four "stages of cognitive development", which, as this book mentions, are sometimes used by educators to assess their students' level of intellectual development, and thereby determine appropriate activities for stimulating those students' development.

While his stages of cognitive development represent his most widely-known and widely-applied ideas in the field of "genetic psychology" that he is credited for creating, I won't delve into taxonomy, but rather point out a few observations that seemed relevant to me at this time in my life.

Philosophy/epistemology: epistemology is the study of knowledge, how it is obtained, and how true it is.  Broadly speaking, there is rationalism, which holds that truth and knowledge can be arrived at seemly through logical thought, in the mind, and there is empiricism, which holds that knowledge can only be gained through experiences with the world external to the mind.  The divergence can be traced as far back as to Plato and Aristotle, respectively.  For Piaget, in studying children as the learn about the world, knowledge comes from both; experiences in the world, and the mental activities which process those experiences.  He calls this Constructivism, as the child constructs his/her own version of knowledge of the world.  Personally, this explanation of knowledge makes the Rationalism vs. Empiricism debate seem ridiculous.  If you want to how knowledge originates, obviously you should watch how a child develops knowledge.

Conservation: Much of the source for Piaget's theories come from interviews with children.  "Piaget on Piaget" is an excellent short film from 1977 that captures many of these and post-interview explanations.  One topic for these interviews is the concept of Conservation.  Given a certain quantity of clay, water, sticks, etc, when the material is reshaped or divided up, younger children often recognize the new form as either more or less in quantity.  The answers the children give to why they believe the quantity is different provides an insight into the child's thought processes, and can determine to which stage of intellectual development the child belongs.  Numerous interviews showed to Piaget that children follow surprisingly similar paths of development.

Intelligence: Piaget defines intelligence as the capacity to adapt to new situations.  I like this idea and the opposite which would say that someone unwilling to change or unwilling to try to understand the situation of a person dissimilar to him/her is not pursuing intelligence.  I would not say that this person is not intelligent, just that he/she perhaps embraces ignorance a little too readily.

Errors: To Piaget, when a child makes what to an adult would seem to be a logical error, the child is making a valid determination of truth based on the knowledge that the child has developed up until that time in his/her life.  In other words, he/she has not erred.  One example dialog from the book:

- ma, i want peaches
- there are no peaches, they ripen in the summer, and it is winter
- what is this?
- peaches in syrup
- great!  summer is here!
- ???
...
- (ma took peaches out of a can... it is not summer...)
- in summer there are peaches and ma buys them at the fruit stand.  in winter i can eat the ones from a can.

In this type of interaction, the child modifies his knowledge, and comes away with a more comprehensive theory.

As far as practical applications, Piaget inspired the "Active School" movement, which I am not familiar with, but would guess encourages small group activities, and discourages excessive reliance on mechanical and repetitive teaching and learning.  In my 2.5 years of teaching, I was definitely moving away from rote memorization techniques to methods more popular in the educational community such as requiring a more active role on the part of the student, including group activities, and I tend to now think that Piaget had a part in this movement.

Outside of education, I think that a parent of a small child could use some of these insights in order to encourage the intellectual development of their child.  In brief: keep the child stimulated.