Jean Piaget

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

— Jean Piaget

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

— Jean Piaget

Teaching means creating situations where structures can be discovered.

— Jean Piaget

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

— Jean Piaget

Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.

— Jean Piaget

Play is the answer to the question, 'How does anything new come about?'

— Jean Piaget

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

— Jean Piaget

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

— Jean Piaget

In other words, knowledge of the external world begins with an immediate utilisation of things, whereas knowledge of self is stopped by…

— Jean Piaget

True interest appears when the self identifies itself with ideas or objects, when it finds in them a means of expression and…

— Jean Piaget

The self thus becomes aware of itself, at least in its practical action, and discovers itself as a cause among other causes…

— 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

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

— Jean Piaget

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

— Jean Piaget

What is desired is that the teacher ceased being a lecturer, satisfied with transmitting ready-made solutions. His role should rather be that…

— Jean Piaget

I engage my subjects in conversation, patterned after psychiatric questioning, with the aim of discovering something about the reasoning underlying their right…

— Jean Piaget

With regard to moral rules, the child submits more or less completely in intention to the rules laid down for him, but…

— Jean Piaget

The child who defines a lie as being a "naughty word" knows perfectly well that lying consists in not speaking the truth.…

— Jean Piaget

There is little mysticism without an element of transcendence, and conversely, there is no transcendence without a certain degree of egocentrism. It…

— Jean Piaget

I am convinced that there is no sort of boundary between the living and the mental or between the biological and the…

— Jean Piaget

“A fact is first an answer to a question. If Sartre had consulted psychologists before judging them in the light of his…

— Jean Piaget

The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other…

— Jean Piaget

The more the schemata are differentiated, the smaller the gap between the new and the familiar becomes, so that novelty, instead of…

— Jean Piaget

“To expect a fact, is by definition to expect the isolated, it is for positivism, to prefer the ‘accident’ to the essential,…

— Jean Piaget

Mixture of assimilation to earlier schemas and adaptation to the actual conditions of the situation is what defines motor intelligence. But and…

— Jean Piaget

The relations between parents and children are certainly not only those of constraint. There is spontaneous mutual affection, which from the first…

— Jean Piaget

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

— Jean Piaget

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

— Jean Piaget

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

— Jean Piaget

During the first few months of an infant's life, its manner of taking the breast, of laying its head on the pillow,…

— Jean Piaget

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

— Jean Piaget

Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do: when neither innateness nor learning has prepared you for the…

— Jean Piaget

The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other…

— Jean Piaget

The current state of knowledge is a moment in history, changing just as rapidly as the state of knowledge in the past…

— Jean Piaget

Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently…

— Jean Piaget

Logical activity is not the whole of intelligence. One can be intelligent without being particularly logical.

— Jean Piaget

During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only…

— 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

Before playing with his equals, the child is influenced by his parents. He is subjected from his cradle to a multiplicity of…

— Jean Piaget

Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what is already known? Or should we try to develop creative and…

— Jean Piaget