PIAGET, JEAN

This entry is focused on the main intertwined philosophical and psychological

underpinnings of Piaget’s (1896-1980) views on education. It relates these to his theory

of psychological development and also points to some misinterpretations of Piaget’s

views.

Introduction

Education was not the central interest in Piaget’s research program. He refused to be

considered an educationist, and what he wrote on education represents only a 300th part

of his life’s work, which totals about 35,000 pages.

Piaget considered himself an epistemologist or a theorist of scientific

knowledge. Going further than other epistemologists, who only reflect philosophically

on scientific knowledge, Piaget appealed to developmental psychology to investigate

and “test” what he called the two great mysteries of knowledge:

1. How do new forms of knowledge appear and develop in the course of

ontogenesis or the individual’s development. For example, how does a youngster come

to acquire concrete operational thinking (e.g., come to understand that the number of

elements in a set remains the same regardless of their spatial configuration in the set --

number conservation)?

2. How do such forms of knowledge come to be regarded as necessary? That is,

how they come to be understood not only as actually being the case (i.e., true

knowledge), but also as necessarily having to be the case (i.e., necessary knowledge)?

(The knowledge involved in the example above is not only true but also necessary).

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 These two concerns gave rise to a complex theory of the subject’s psychological

development that has been highly influential in shaping theoretical debate and empirical

research both in developmental psychology and educational thought. Every textbook on

educational psychology and developmental psychology published today contains a

discussion of Piaget’s theory of psychological development.

Development Through Stages

In brief, Piaget’s (1960, 1970a) theory holds that as time goes by, the individual’s

cognitive apparatus, specifically the logical structures -- which constitute a framework

shaping the individual’s interactions with the world -- become more adequate for

dealing with the complexities of experience. It can be noted here that there is more than

a passing similarity to the categories of understanding postulated by Immanuel Kant,

which serve a similar function but with the important difference that the Kantian

categories do not develop over time in the individual but presumably are hardwired or

inborn.

The developmental stages that Piaget (1960) identified are characterized by

several criteria. They represent new and qualitatively distinct forms of knowing; they

are integrative in that a given stage always integrates its predecessor; they develop

according to an invariant sequence in the sense that the lower stages necessarily occur

before the higher ones; they are hierarchical -- that is, a given stage has something

more and coordinates more dimensions or perspectives than the precedent one; they are

structural because they are organized or structured by what Piaget called a structure-of-

the-whole (similar ways of solving intellectual tasks, e.g., number conservation or class

inclusion, whose content is different and that are organized together cognitively);

finally, they involve a phase of preparation, when the subject is passing from a lower

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stage to a higher one, and a phase of consolidation, when a given stage is well

established in the individual’s mind.

Cognitive development, then, proceeds through four stages. At the sensorimotor

stage (from birth to two years approximately), children relate to others and the world

through senses and movement and are capable of what Piaget called practical

intelligence; for example, at the end of this stage, they can look for a desired object

which vanished from their vision because it was hidden under several covers (i.e. object

permanence).

At the preoperational stage (from roughly two to seven years), children are

capable of mental actions, for example, playing with a doll as if it were a dog (i.e.,

pretend or symbolic play), but not capable, for instance, of understanding that a rose is a

rose but also a flower. Thus, children at this stage are not yet capable of what Piaget

called operations, or actions that are mental, reversible, and governed by rules of

transformation -- for instance, children are not yet able to understand that in a set of 10

flowers with eight roses and two daffodils, there are more flowers than there are roses

because daffodils are flowers too (i.e., class inclusion), or that the operation

2 + 8 = 10 can be nullified through an inverse operation, 10 – 8 = 2 (i.e., number

conservation). As preoperational children are figurative or perception oriented, when

asked in this class inclusion task if there are more flowers or roses, they answer that

there are more roses, because there are a lot of roses and only a few daffodils. As roses

and daffodils can be seen -- which is not the case with the abstract class “flowers” --

preoperational children compare roses with daffodils instead of thinking of both as

subclasses of a broad class or concept -- flowers.

At the concrete operational stage (from ages 7 to 12 on average), the child is

capable of operating or thinking logically, but always with basis in concrete or material

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things that can be subject to seriation, class inclusion, conservation, transitivity, and so

forth. A child who is capable of operating in the intellectual domain is also capable of

cooperating with others in the social domain and of disputing or argumentation in the

verbal domain. This solidarity among operation, cooperation, and argumentation is a

token of Piaget’s structural perspective, which lies at the heart of his epistemology and

developmental psychology, and has implications for his views on education.

At the formal operational stage (from ages 12/13 to16, on average),

individuals are capable of abstract reasoning; for example, they can understand the

following: “If p, then q; it is not the case that p, therefore nothing can be concluded

about q”.

For Piaget, the individual’s progression through these cognitive stages implies a

procees of functional continuity in that at all stages individuals function intellectually in

the same way: They assimilates the unknown to their cognitive structures or forms of

knowing, and the individuals/learners enrich these structures as they accommodate them

to the novelties coming from outside. This process of a continuous interaction between

assimilation and accommodation, which Piaget called equilibration, gives rise to an

ever-increasing active adaptation of the individual to his or her physical and social

environment, that is, to more advanced cognitive stages and their underlying cognitive

structures. It is in this sense that Piaget speaks of structural discontinuity as

development goes on.

This complex and rather abstract theory has been misunderstood by many

psychologists (see Lourenço & Machado, 1996). The idea that age is for Piaget a

criterion rather than an indicator of development is just one example. Although Piaget

has associated his stages with certain ages, age is not for him a criterion of

development. Contrary claims notwithstanding, the idea that a younger child may be

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more cognitively or morally advanced than an older one does not contradict Piaget,

simply because age is an indicator and not a criterion of development. This is one of the

reasons why Piaget was more interested in the sequence of transformations than the

chronology of acquisitions.

Education is a Scientifically Oriented Process

Although stating that teaching did not interest him, Piaget wrote a lot on education,

mainly while he was the director of the international bureau of education (1929-1967).

His two main books on education: To Understand is to Invent: The Future of Education

(1973) and Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child (1970b), are pervaded

by the idea that only education is capable of saving societies from possible collapse,

whether violent or gradual.

For Piaget, education should be oriented by a scientific theory of the individual’s

psychological development. This means that the teacher should know his or her subject

of specialization (Piaget argued for a college or university background even for

preschool teachers) but also be knowledgeable of the individual’s psychological

development. If the former is not the case, the teacher is no teacher at all. If the later is

not the case, the teacher risks teaching to his or her pupils material that is much above

or below their cognitive stage, and hence material that is ill-tuned to their cognitive

ability to understand.

Consider the case in which a teacher intends to teach to a concrete operational

pupil the idea of proportionality, which requires formal operational competencies. As

such an idea is much above the concrete operational stage, the risk is that the pupil will

memorize rather than understand the material that is being taught. In short, there is

neither significant teaching nor significant learning because no assimilation/

accommodation is taking place.

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 It is worth mentioning, however, that Piaget admitted and valued what he called

operational learning (see Inhelder, Sinclair, & Bovet, 1974), a form of learning wherein

by interacting with more competent children, a child comes to understand some

problems or situations that are not much above his or her own cognitive stage. Contrary

claims notwithstanding, this possibility shows that, to an extent, Piaget is not at

complete variance with Bruner’s (1960) idea that we can teach effectively in an

intellectually honest manner any subject to any child at any stage of development and

also with Lev Vygotsky’s (1978) idea of the zone of proximal development. (This latter

is the distance between the child’s actual developmental level as determined by

independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined

through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable

peers.)

Consider now the case wherein a teacher intends, for instance, to teach a formal

operational student the idea of number conservation, which requires only concrete

operational competencies. Given that such an idea is much below the cognitive stage of

the student, the student is not interested in what is supposed to be taught because he or

she knows the point in advance. As a result, there is nothing to be assimilated to, or

incorporated into, the student’s cognitive structures -- there is nothing to which the

student has to accommodate his or her existing cognitive structures. Therefore, no

significant teaching or learning occurs.

These two examples show that Piaget’s views on education -- mainly his

conceptualization of the main goal of education being the creation of individuals who

are creative, inventive and discovers who are not limited to simply repeating what other

generations have done -- is rooted in his scientific theory of psychological development.

This is also true of the active methods he advocated for education. The teacher is more a

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mentor and an organizer of learning situations, someone who helps students to actively

rediscover or reconstruct every truth to be learned, than a simple transmitter of

knowledge (see more below).

Education is a Process Oriented to Moral and

Intellectual Autonomy

As noted above, for Piaget, the goal of intellectual education is to develop intelligence

rather than to promote rote learning, and to give rise to inventors rather than to

conformist people. The goal of moral education is to develop an autonomous morality, a

morality oriented to equality, cooperation, and mutual respect, not a heteronomous

morality, a morality based on obedience, coercion, and mutual respect (Piaget, 1932).

Thus, for Piaget, education aims at forming autonomous and critical individuals,

not individuals who are oriented to an uncritical acceptance of dogmas, established

truths or truths imposed from outside.

This objective stands in sharp contrast with the conservative goal of traditional

education, which is to inculcate and transmit to students the existing knowledge and

values from one generation to another. It is worth stressing here that individuals who

do not accept dogmas and truths imposed from without are autonomous individuals in

intellectual and moral terms, for they are more self-governed than dependent upon

established moral norms or intellectual truths.

The following are three common misunderstandings of Piaget’s views on

education as a process oriented to the individual’s autonomy:

1. Piaget equates autonomy to total freedom.

2. He sees intellectual and moral autonomy as being synonymous with

individualism.

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 3. He considers heteronomous morality and autonomous morality as stages of

moral development.

For Piaget, far from implying total freedom, autonomy requires one to be subject

to prescriptive and reversible moral principles, such as the golden rule in the moral

domain (do not do onto others what you would not like others to do onto you), or to be

subject to reason more than to perception while solving cognitive tasks. When children

think that the amount of elements in a set depends on their spatial arrangement in the

set, they are being figurative, preoperational or perceptually oriented -- and, so to speak,

intellectually heteronomous. When children understand that such an amount is

independent of its spatial configuration, they are being operative, operational and reason

oriented -- and, so to say, intellectually autonomous (Piaget, 1966).

Autonomy for Piaget is not tantamount to individualism but, rather, involves

exchanging points of views, and coordinating different perspectives. Whereas a

heteronomous moral child judges a moral transgression (e.g., stealing) as a function of

the physical outcomes it involves, an autonomous moral child takes also into account

the intentions underlying the respective transgression. In the same vein, an operational

child who in a liquid conservation task integrates the tallness and the width of a glass

containing water is more advanced and intellectually autonomous than a preoperational

child who attends only to one of these two dimensions. As a result, the operational, but

not the preoperational, child understands liquid conservation, that is, that the amount of

water in a glass remains the same, regardless of the size of the glass.

This means that those who fault Piaget for being oriented to individualism in his

views on development and education are not aware that on several occasions he has

argued as follow:

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 1 Individuals would not come to organize their operations in a coherent whole if

they did not engage in thought exchanges and cooperation with others.

2 There are neither individuals as such nor society as such, there are just inter-

individual relations.

3 The active school to which he appealed presupposes alternating between

individual work and work in groups.

4 Collective living has shown to be essential to the full development of one’s

personality.

Contrary views notwithstanding, Piaget has never considered heteronomous

morality and autonomy morality as successive stages of moral development, but as

moral attitudes that may coexist at the same age in the same child.

Education is an Interactionist Process

For Piaget, learning has two distinct meanings. In its strict sense, it means all

knowledge and values acquired due to a specific, discrete experience; a child who learns

that a sphere is different from a circumference is a case in point. In a broader sense,

learning is a process equivalent to development for it involves a continuous interaction

between the individual and his or her physical and social environment. For Piaget

(1964), learning in its developmental sense depends not only on the three traditional

factors he called the “American question” (i.e., maturation, physical experience, and

social experience, including language) but also, and mainly, on the process he calls

equilibration or self-regulation. (Equilibration is a balance between assimilation --

which involves dealing with the environmental stimulus using the present cognitive

structures -- and accommodation, in which an environmental factor stimulates a change

in the existing cognitive structures. This dual process leads to an ever-increasing active

adaption to the environment is documented in the following ideas:

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 1. Knowledge and education are the result of a continuous interaction between

assimilation and accommodation.

2. Individuals develop and learn as they interact with their physical and social

milieu.

3. Equilibration incorporates and interrelates the three traditional factors of the

individual’s development.

4. The active methods are neither entirely teacher centered nor entirely child

centered but, rather, consist in a teacher organizing classroom situation and

involving students in experimentation.

5. Individuals can achieve their inventions and intellectual constructions only to the

extent that they are involved in collective interactions.

6. The most appropriate methods to interview children is the Piagetian (1929)

clinical method, which consists mainly of a verbal exchange/interaction between

the interviewer and the interviewee to grasp the interviewee’s own way of

thinking (these interviews are not designed to teach the interviewee the correct

answers to the interviewer’s questions).

Education is a Constructivist Process

Constructivism has a variety of meanings, the discussion of which is beyond the scope of

this entry. However, the idea that Piaget embraced a constructivist conception of

development and education is accepted by all psychologists and educators. For Piaget,

to embrace a constructivist stance implies adopting the following three intertwined

ideas:

1. The importance of action, be it sensorimotor (e.g., to hide an object under a blanket)

or mental (e.g., to understand that the arithmetic operation of multiplication can be

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 undone by the arithmetic operation of division; 5 X 4 = 20; 20/4 = 5), for the

individual’s development and education is paramount.

2. Although maturation, physical experience, and social experience play a role in

individuals’ development and education, it is their actions on objects that are the

ultimate factors in their development and education.

3. Knowledge is not a copy of reality. To know an object or an event is not simply to

look at it and make a mental copy of it --.to know an object is to act on it, to

transform the object, and to understand the process of this transformation (Piaget,

1964).

Piaget’s ideas that: (a) a truth learnt is only a half-truth because to understand is

to discover, or reconstruct by rediscovery; (b) the most appropriate methods to use in

schools are the active methods, for they give broad scope to spontaneous research on the

part of the individual and require that every new truth to be learned is rediscovered or at

least reconstructed by the students, not simply imparted to them; and (c) the main goal

of education is to give rise to inventors and creators, not to conformist people, are clear

expressions of his constructivist conception of education.

However, Piaget’s constructivist conception of education has given rise to three

common misunderstandings:

1. The teacher has no role in students’ education, and their success depends on

leaving them entirely free to work or play as they will.

2. Piaget’s emphasis on the subject’s actions and coordination of actions as

being the main factors responsible for this or her development and education

overlooks the role of the three aforementioned traditional factors.

3. Because Piaget subordinates learning to development, education cannot

accelerate the individual’s development.

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 With respect to the first misunderstanding, suffices it to say that for Piaget what

is desirable is that the teacher ceases to be a lecturer and is instead a mentor stimulating

the students’ initiative and research. As for the second misunderstanding, Piaget never

denied the role of maturation, physical experience, and social transmission in the

subject’s development and education. However, for him, a social transmission or

stimulus is only significant to the extent that there is a cognitive structure or level of

development which allows its assimilation.

Regarding the third misunderstanding, Piaget accepted the idea that, to an extent,

it is possible to accelerate the subject’s operational competencies, such as class

inclusion and transitivity. Although he accepted this possibility, Piaget (1964, 1973) had

the following to ask:

(1) Is such acceleration beneficial or rather detrimental to the child’s

development and education? For Piaget, whenever one prematurely teaches

a given child something that he could have discovered by himself that child

remains deprived of complete understating.

(2) Is this learning through acceleration lasting?

(3) How much generalization is possible?

(4) What was the subject’s operational level or stage of development before a

given learning experience, and what more complex structures has this

learning succeeded in achievement?

In short, for Piaget, we must look at each specific learning experience from the

viewpoint point of what spontaneous operations were present at the outset and what

operational level has been achieved after the learning experience.

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 This entry’s focus on the main psychological and philosophical underpinnings of

Piaget’s views on education, should have revealed the extent to which this entry shows

how much Piaget was ahead of his time.

Orlando Lourenço

See also: Adolescent Development; Autonomy; Bruner, Jerome; Childhood,

concept of; Dewey, John; Moral Development: Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol

Gilligan; Radical Constructivism: Ernst von Glasersfeld; Vygotsky, Lev.

FURTHER READINGS

Bruner, J. (1960). The process of education. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press.

Inhelder, B., Sinclair, H., & Bovet, M. (1974). Learning and cognitive development (S.

Wedgood, Tans.). Cambrige, MA: Cambridge University Press. (Original work

published 1974)

Kamii, C. (2000). Young children reinvent arithmetic. 2nd ed. NY: Teachers College

Press.

Lourenço, O., & Machado, A. (1996). In defense of Piaget’s theory: A reply to 10

common criticisms. Psychological Review, 103, 143-164.

Piaget, J. (1929). The child conception of the world (J. Tomlinson & A. Tomlinson,

Trans.). London: Kegan Paul Trench Trubner. (Original work published 1926)

Piaget, J. (1932). The moral judgment of the child (M. Gabain, Trans.). London: Kegan

Paul Trench Trubner. (Original work published 1932)

Piaget, J. (1960). The general problems of the psychobiological development of the

child. In J. Tanner & B. Inhelder (Eds.), Discussions on child development: Vol. 4

(pp. 3-27). London: Tavistock. &

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Piaget, J. (1964). Development and learning. In R. Ripple & U. Rockcastle (Eds),

Piaget rediscovered (pp.7-20). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Piaget, J. (1966). The psychology of intelligence (M. Pierce & D. Berlyne, Trans.).NJ:

Littlefield, Adams & CO. (Original work published 1947)

Piaget, J. (1970a). Piaget’s theory. In P. Mussen (Ed.), Carmichael’s manual of child

psychology, Vol. 1 (pp. 703-832). New York: Wiley.

Piaget, J. (1970b). Science of education and the psychology of the child. (D. Coltman,

Trans.). London: Kegan Paul Trench Trubner. (Original work published 1969)

Piaget, J. (1973). To understand is to invent: The future of education. (G. Roberts,

Trans.). NY: Grossman Publishers. (Original work published 1972)

Smith, L. (2009). Piaget’s pedagogy. In U, Müller., J. Carpendale., & L. Smith (Eds.),

The British companion to Piaget (pp. 324-343). Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological

processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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