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Portrait of Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget

(1896–1980) Psychologist

112 quotes in 509 categories

Piaget says education should let children discover things for themselves instead of being taught too early. He believes the mind’s main job is to understand and invent, building structures from experience. He also notes that logic is created, not innate, so teaching should focus on reasoning.

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Jean Piaget was a psychologist, best known for Le jugement moral chez l'enfant.

Quick Facts About Jean Piaget

Born: August 9, 1896
Died: September 16, 1980
Profession: Psychologist
Notable works: Le jugement moral chez l'enfant

About Jean Piaget

Jean William Fritz Piaget was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called genetic epistemology.

Quotes by Jean Piaget

To understand is to invent.

Funny

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We learn more when we are compelled to invent.

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I could not think without writing.

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Play is the answer to how anything new comes about.

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Play is the work of childhood.

Child

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Experience precedes understanding.

Experience

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Punishment renders autonomy of conscience impossible.

Autonomy

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

Intellectual

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

Change

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

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The most developed science remains a continual becoming

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Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity.

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Children require long, uniterrupted periods of play and exploration

Child

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

Construction

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

Abstraction

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From this time on, the universe is built up into an aggregate of permanent objects connected by causal relations that are independent…

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

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

Argument

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

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The more we try to improve our schools, the heavier the teaching task becomes; and the better our teaching methods the more…

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

Argument

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The child is a realist in every domain of thought, and it is therefore natural that in the moral sphere he should…

Child

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

Autonomy

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As far as the game of marbles is concerned, there is therefore no contradiction between the egocentric practice of games and the…

Adults

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“For someone who constantly comes across this problem in the course of his professional activities, the question whether philosophy has the status…

Failure

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The child often sees only what he already knows. He projects the whole of his verbal thought into things. He sees mountains…

Child

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Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society . . . but…

Adults

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To reason logically is so to link one's propositions that each should contain the reason for the one succeeding it, and should…

Construction

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Children's games constitute the most admirable social institutions. The game of marbles, for instance, as played by boys, contains an extremely complex…

Children

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Before games are played in common, no rules in the proper sense can come into existence. Regularities and ritualized schemas are already…

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At one time, many philosophers held that faultless "laws of thought" were somehow inherent, a priori, in the very nature of mind.…

Belief

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For the fundamental fact of human psychology is that society, instead of remaining almost entirely inside the individual organism as in the…

Animal

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Much research in psychology has been more concerned with how large groups of people behave than about the particular ways in which…

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“Every observer has noted that the younger the child, the less sense he has of his own ego. From the intellectual point…

Children

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In certain circumstances where he experiments in new types of conduct by cooperating with his equals, the child is already an adult.…

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“Piaget is also concerned with attempts of Maine de Biran, Bergson, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty to construct a philosophical psychology as opposed to…

Philosophical

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“I know some very intelligent philosophers, not at all dogmatic, who believe that “science” cannot introduce the concept of finality in the…

Biology

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“This new philosophical psychology can in this respect be traced back to Maine de Biran, for even if in his time scientific…

Philosophy

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The discussion of the game of marbles seems to have led us into rather deep waters. But in the eyes of children…

Behaviour

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

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Jean Piaget by topic

Children (32) Psychology (17) Education (16)