Enfance

Wallon and Piaget

Beverly Birns, Gilbert Voyat

Abstract
In this short introduction to the life and work of Henri Wallon, we have compared the ideas of Wallon and Piaget. We have
discussed their ideas concerning the concept of the child, stages of development, language and education. We can thank Piaget
for drawing our attention to the stages and mechanisms of cognitive growth in the child. By studying this one aspect of
development, he traced the childs ability to interact with her environment in increasingly complex ways.
However, it was Wallon who insisted that cognition should not be studied in isolation. He insisted that the child's development
must be viewed in terms of the interaction of emotional as well as cognitive factors. He also insisted that the child is basically a
social organism, and that her interaction with the environment affects all aspects of development, at all times.
We noted that Piaget and Wallon considered, criticized and respected each others work. Piaget' s work has become very
popular throughout the world. We would like to think that Wallon' s work with its emphasis on the child and its relation to the
society in which it grows will become as widely considered in the English speaking, as well as other areas of the world. Wallon,
a man before his time, wrote about issues which are today of great importance to all of us, who are concerned with the health
and mental growth of all children.

Citer ce document / Cite this document :

Birns Beverly, Voyat Gilbert. Wallon and Piaget. In: Enfance, tome 32, n°5, 1979. Centenaire d'Henri Wallon. pp. 321-333;

doi : https://doi.org/10.3406/enfan.1979.2680

https://www.persee.fr/doc/enfan_0013-7545_1979_num_32_5_2680

Fichier pdf généré le 10/05/2018

ENFANCE 1979, N°5
Centenaire d'Henri Wallon.

Wallon and Piaget

by

Beverly BIRNS (1) and Gilbert VOYAT (2)

On this, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Henri Wallon, the great
French psychologist, we are gathered here to pay tribute to this man. As part
of this tribute, I have been asked to discuss and compare the work of Wallon
with that of another great contemporary psychologist, Jean Piaget. While
Piaget has an international reputation among psychologists and laymen
alike, Wallon, though widely known in many parts of the world, remains
largely unknown in the English speaking world. In many ways it seems to me
that the work of Wallon, now dead for almost 20 years, should be of great
interest to American as well as European psychologists. Many of his
concerns are in the forefront of the debates and research currently occupying
American as well as European scholars.
Before I attempt to summarize the work of Wallon, by comparing it
to that of Piaget, it might first be useful to think a little about the lives of the
two men. In the tradition of Wallon, we will see how the conditions of their
lives influenced their thought and action.
We will begin with Piaget, since as a former student of Piaget I have
more direct knowledge of him. Piaget, as we know, began his career and his
writing at an early age in the field of biology. The interest gradually shifted
to an interest in philosophy and genetic epistemology.
As Piaget was interested in the philosophical question of how
knowledge is acquired in the course of the development of societies, he became
interested in how knowledge was acquired by each individual. His early
work was concerned with the thought of young children and we owe him
a great debt for providing us with brilliant descriptions of the ways in which
the young child's thought differs from that of an adult. His early work on
language and thought and causalty, provides endless rich examples of how
differently kids conceive and perceive their world from the way that we do.

(1) Beverly Birns, Ph. D. - Social Science Interdisciplinary Program, SUNY, Stony Brook,
New-York 11794
and Albert Einstein College of Médecine - 1300 Morris Park Avenue, Bronx, New-York.
(2) Gilbert Voyat, Ph. D. Département of Psychology, City College, 3332 Broadway,
New- York 10031
and Graduate Center of the City University of New-York.
 322
Years after I left Geneva, I remember watching one of my own children
awaken and begin a search in the house for a friend, whom he had not really
seen in several months. It was several moments before I realized that my son
Peter had dreamt about playing with this child and for him at the age of four
the reality of dreams could be easily understood. Piaget's concepts of
animism and artificialism, remain of great value in understanding the nature
of child thought. Without necessarily agreeing with all of his explanatory
conceptions, we can nonetheless appreciate the richness of this thought that
has generated so much research in the past 25 years.
At the same time, in the years that I was a student in Geneva, 1942-1952,
I had many questions and concerns, that remained unanswered, but that
can be better understood now. In America, at that time, the field of social
psychology was gathering many exciting findings - to take one example the
fact that black children suffered directly from the anti-black attitudes of
white society had been brilliantly documented by Kenneth Clark. Therefore
it came as somewhat of a surprise to me to come to Geneva, so few years after
the end of W.W. II, to study child Psychology in a city, in the center of
Europe that seemed totally untouched, not only physically but
philosophically and theoretically bu the events of the war. We studied children from a
purely cognitive point of view. Many Piagetians believe that thought
develops independently of the external conditions of life. Nonetheless
I wondered how come ideas of children seemed so divorced from the
conditions of the lives of the children.
Another concern, also related to that epoch in history and work in both
Europe and America concerned the relationships between children and their
parents. Again, American psychologists were already concerned with
parent -child interaction and while I was in Geneva the Bowlby monograph
appeared. I wondered as I read Piaget's books on infancy especially,
La Formation du Symbole my favorite, how one can write so much about the
experience of infancy, with so little said about the role of the mother. Some
30 years later, and somewhat less intolerant, I appreciate the right of any
scientist to limit his/her search for truth to any one segment of human
experience. No one person, no matter how great a genious could cover it all.
I think it is nonetheless interesting that it is in Switzerland, untouched by the
war, that the child was studied by Piaget from a purely « cognitive » point
of view and that the child's thought was conceived to be initially egocentric
and a-social. It remains of interest to me, having attended Piaget's course
on affectivity, and having read the short article he has written on this topic
to acknowledge how little importance be attributes to this crucial aspect of
development.
Perhaps most interesting as an American is to see how and why Piaget's
thought became so dominant in American Psychology at precisely the time
that it did. In the 50's after Sputnik, after the acknowledgment of poverty
and impoverishment of a large segment of our children, cognition and the
tracking of cognitive skills became number one on the agenda in American
education. Thus Piaget's theories became popular.
When then of Wallon ? Wallon began his scholarly career as a
philosopher, but then went on to study (and practice) medicine. Therefore,
although he too became very interested in how the mind develops, he viewed
this development from a very different perspective.
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In trying to outline some of the main themes of the life of Wallon,

I should like to thank, Professor Zazzo who, as Wallon's student, then
colleague and collaborator, was also his biographer and has provided the
material that I would like to share with you. Perhaps we can think of Wallon
in at least five different contexts, all somewhat different, but also completely
integrated in his life. The five threads are as follow :
1. The man of social conscience - A man who wanted to improve the quality
of life for all people.
2. The philosopher, and more specifically the Marxist.
3. The physician -the healer, who wanted to understand illness as well as
cure it.
4. The educator -who sought educational reform, as well as an
understanding of the educational process.
5. Wallon, the psychologist -who tried to integrate all of the above into the
study of human nature.
It is clear both from recorded interviews with Wallon, as well as his
biographical data that Wallon's social conscience, whereas not inherited,
was an important part of his childhoot experience and family heritage. His
granfather whose name he bore was a University Professor. However he
gave up his University chair to become active in Politics. As a member of the
National Assembly he struggled to maintain universal suffrage. He resigned
from the assembly when universal suffrage was violated. Wallon's father
was also very concerned with political issues and raised his children to be
concerned with social justice. When Wallon was a young child, Victor Hugo
died. At the time of Hugo's death, his father read to his children some of
Hugo's writing (Châtiments). His father explained that Hugo had been
against tyranny. This episode and many others like it left their mark on
Wallon. His social conscience, which developed early, remained a very
important part of his life. As a young professor of philosophy, his final
lecture to his students concerned social responsibility. What he had to say
was : since the students were fortunate enough to have an education, as
adults they now had a responsibility to their fellow human beings. In fact,
he said, they had a debt to society to live for others, not just themselves. At
all times in his life he felt a keen sense of responsibility to his fellow human
beings. He never compromised his own political beliefs, no matter how
expedient it might have been. At times he risked his life, and certainly his
career, because he maintained his commitment to social change.
Both his own early life experience as well as his early professional
training led him to that branch of philosophy called dialectical materialism.
In brief, what this meant was the belief that both physical and psychological
experience conformed to objective reality. Furthermore reality is
understandable, if not completely understood, at any one given moment in history.
Dialectics also implies that people and nature cannot be studied as isolated
elements, nor even solely in terms of their interrelations. Rather the
contradictions and change inherent in nature must be analysed. Part of this
belief was that social conflict was an important part of human history as
well as the history of ideas. Dialectical materialism means the search for the
laws of society and nature. Although Wallon considered himself a Marxist,
he was very critical of those Marxists who used Marxism as a total theory. He
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valued it rather as a way of looking at science and particularly for him,

psychology. He remained throughout his life fearful of the potential rigidity
of any formalized doctrine.
As Wallon moved from philosopher to physician, his interest in
understanding the nature of human existence expanded to include an interest in
brain function. Early in his training, he believed, along with the « organicists »
that «mind» could be reduced to the physiology of the nervous system.
However, as a physician, he treated soldiers who had been wounded in the
war. He then came to a very different way of looking at the mind-body
relationship. On the one hand he became interested in specific brain lesions.
He understood that specific lesions led to specific problems in functioning.
However he also treated and studied many soldiers who had no known
lesions of the nervous system. Some of these men also presented very serious
psychological symptoms. This observation gave rise to his belief that
emotions were the most primitive and all pervasive form of psychological
functioning. Furthermore it did not require lesions of the brain to produce
psychological problems.
Throughout the life and work of Wallon we see the continued point of
view that refuses to consider the person as thinker separate from the person
with emotions. He was concerned with the mind-body interaction, as he was
with the person-environment interaction.
For about two decades Wallon was primarily involved with two very
different kinds of activities, namely educational reform and ridding France
of the Nazis. During the second World War he joined the communists in
their fight against facism. Although he was forced to leave his home, he
continued his work at the Institute, and continued the fight against the
Germans. All the while the Gestapo was lodged in the building directly
opposite the Institute. He was a man who truly had the courage of his
convictions.
At the end of the war De Gaulle asked Wallon to serve as Vice President
of the Ministry of Ed, where he developed the Langevin - Wallon reform.
In 1949 at the age of 70, he was forced to retire.
His concern for the recognition of the rights of children were reflected in
his statement regarding « equality and diversity». He wrote « All children,
irrespective of their family, social, religious and ethnic background, have an
equal right to a maximized opportunity for the development of their
personalities». Clearly, words we need to listen to in 1979 as in 1944.
And now tolon, the psychologist. Each psychologist carves out
for him/herself the critical question, or the critical issue to study. For
Skinner it is the laws of learning and for Freud the nature of the unconscious.
For Piaget it is clearly the nature of thought and the relation of psychology
to all other fields of knowledge. For Wallon, it is understanding human
nature. He wanted to explain the behavior of the individual child or adult
as a function of that person's total environment. He was interested in the
child's biological make-up and the earliest relationship between the mother
and the child. He followed the continous change that occurs as the child
matures in an ever changing environment. One of his major contributions
concerns his insistence that the child always be considered in terms of
cognitive and affective behaviors and always in relation to his/her
environment.
 325

CONCEPT OF THE CHILD

Perhaps the easiest way to compare Wallon and Piaget's concepts of the
child is to hypothesize, on the basis of their writings, how they would explain
the term « child » to a Martian newly arrived on earth. Both Piaget and
Wallon would agree that a child is qualitatively different than an adult and
that it is a being that develops in stages.
For Piaget, the epistemologist, the child is one who is constantly in a
state of acquiring knowledge, primarily by virtue of his/her actions and
interactions with the physical world. Even during early infancy the child is
developing behavior patterns (schémas) based on his perceptions and actions
on objects. These schémas consist of two kinds of behavior, accomodation
and assimilation. Assimilation and accomodation refer to different aspects
of the child's behavior in relation to objects and events.
From these early sensori-motor schema, the child develops the ability
to symbolize, i.e., let one object or word stand for another and once she/he
can symbolize she/he gradually learns language. Language, according to
Piaget helps the child learn more about his/her environment, but remains
always an instrument of thought, and subordinate to it. The child's early
words and concepts are still highly individual and not always accurate.
Piaget calls this stage preoperational. The child does not yet really
understand how things work, nor how various objects relate to each other.
Gradually language becomes conventionnal and a means of communication
with others.
During the school years, according to Piaget, the child's thoughts become
« operational ». The child knows that substances can be combined and then
separated ; added to and subtracted from, changed in form without changing
weight, etc. Yes the child is in school and schools have teachers, but the child
learns most, even at this stage, from its interactions with the objects. Then
as the child starts to become an adult, she/he becomes what we call « an
adolescent ». Adolescents are system builders. They have internalized the
operations of thought and become capable of abstract thought. They think
like adults. They learn algebra, philosophy and science. They no longer need
objects to manipulate. They can take many factors into account at one time ;
they can acquire all previous knowledge of humanity.
Very impressive! Our Martians might ask -«Are all children the
same?». Piaget would surely answer no, but that they all pass through the
same stages in the same sequence - may be at different rates, (but that doesn't
interest him).
Who takes care of these children and teaches them to become adults?
Parents first and then teachers. « Well then, aren't they important? « Yes,
certainly, he might say, in my books on infancy, I describe my "experiments"
with my babies ». « Could you tell us more about how children are raised ? »
« No, that is not my concern ».
Does the environment of the child make a difference ? Do children in all
places learn the same things? Probably not, but that is for others to study...
What if the same questions were asked of Wallon. What is a child?
What are the stages in its growth ? What influences its growth ? The answers
would be quite different.
 326

Wallon, like Piaget, believed that the child is from the beginning a
biosocial organism. However Wallon placed much greater emphasis on the
child's relationship to others than Piaget.
For Wallon, the earliest, most significant experiences of the child are
with persons, not objects.
Wallon would tell the martians that «psychological development is
closely tied to successive modes of relationships to the environment, both
human and physical » (Genetic Psych. 1956).
During the earliest months of life, the infant is a purely impulsive
organism. It's behavior is dominated by its own needs. The young infant
cries when it is hungry, cold, uncomfortable and clearly has no control over
its own behavior.
Very early the infant begings to associate the satisfaction of its needs
with certain care-taking adults. Gradually a system of communication based
on gesture and mimicry is established between the mother and the infant.
Wallon speaks of the « expressive signal language ». Thus for Wallon, the
infants earliest dominant relationship with its environment is an affective
relationship with people (different than Piaget's infants manipulations of
objects). Wallon refers to this stage as the emotional stage.

The next stage, according to Wallon, is the sensori-motor stage,

beginning at about 8 or 9 months. During this stage the child learns to manipulate
objects. As the infant learns to walk, his/her hands are freed to take things
apart and rebuild them. During this stage cerebral dominance is also
established and the child favors one hand and uses the other to assist. It is
also true that language develops as manual activity becomes perfected.
Wallon considers the sensori-motor stage to be the exploratory stage. He
says that the hand and the word are both « means of objective exploration of
the realities and meanings of the outside world ». During this stage unlike
the one before it and the one to follow, the child's energies are focused on the
world of things. Wallon says : « Such an alternation in the development of
functions is not unusual. Sensori-motor activity detaches the child from
his exclusive relations with people and leads him to the discovery of objects ».
The next stage, called the stage of « personalism » or « personality »
is best understood as the stage of the development of the self. This stage has
several sub-stages. The child in an attempt to solve the confusion between
itself and others, first plays games in which it plays at different roles.
Gradually the child stops playing different roles and becomes militantly
me. The child appears very contrary as it proclaims ownership of things and
desires. « I want » - « that is mine » is what children of this age say all too
often. Gradually the assertion of self changes to the demand for
appreciation. The child now says, « watch me ». Finally during this phase of early
childhood, the child begins to identify with those of great importance to him
or her. At the same time that he or she is trying to discover who he/she is,
this search occurs within the confines of the important people. This is a
period of great growth, but also vulnerability.
At school age the child's personal and intellectual growth becomes more
diversified. The child becomes a part of larger and varying groups. The child
learns to read and to deal with mathematical concepts. Wallon views this
 327

stage as being continuous with sensori-motor development and ending with

the objectivity of thought typical of the adult.
Wallon describes the transition from childhood to adolescence. He
discusses the conflicts and turmoil that accompanys the adolescents
transition « from childhood to adulthood ». Wallon writes « At all events,
whether they are checked or allowed full rein, these emergent needs have a
profound transformative effect on the child's character and intelligence,
adding a completely new dimension to them. They confront the individual
with the question of his testing and responsibilities, they incite him to reflect
upon the raison d'être and value of what surrounds him ».
From all of the preceeding, it can be seen that Wallon's answers to the
martians would be quite different from Piaget's. He sees the childs
interactions with people as being critical from the beginning. Piagets'child goes
from egocentric to social, and is always a cognitive child. Wallon's child
begins life as a social being and varies between being mainly concerned with
interpersonal and cognitive skills. For Piaget parents and teachers are
background ; for Wallon the world of people is as important as the world of
objects and the child's actions on them.
Let us now take a look at the two author's views on how the child
progresses from one stage to the other. Both authors agree that there is both
continuity and discontinuity in development. At any age, the child is in
some ways similar and in some ways dissimilar to what he/she has been
before and what she/he will be in the future. However, they disagree
strongly on the nature of the changes that occur.
Piaget's theory stresses continuity and Wallon insists on the importance
of discontinuity. Thus for Piaget, sensori-motor development forms the
basis for representational thought. Representational thought forms the
basis for operational thought. The accomplishment of operational thought
is that it is basic to formal operational or abstract thought. According to
Piaget, all thought derives ultimately from action and thus there is clear-cut
continuity between the stages. Although Piaget does speak of the necessity
for child-person and certainly child-object interaction, he undoubtedly
emphasizes the « within the child » development from one stage to the next.
Each stage has within it the essence of the subsequent stages.
Wallon discusses the continuity -discontinuity issue, and grants some
continuity between early and later stages, but emphasizes the discontinuity !
He believed that the different stages reflected different dominant qualities
as well as different determinants. Thus he sees the infancy period as one of
emotional dependence and affective communication between the child and
the adult. He also discusses sensori-moror developments. Wallon insists
that at each stage the child's personality is dominated by the newly appearing
function.
Another different but related issue to that of continuity vs. discontinuity
is that of intro-psychic as compared to social determinants of behavior.
Since Piaget believes that each stage derives from the previous stage,
he finds little need to discuss the external factors that influence the child's
cognitive development, although he does not deny their existence. However,
Wallon believed that the child from infancy on through childhood, is a very
social being. He insists that we can only truly understand any particular
 328

development if we understand the environmental events and people that

are influencing the child. Thus he insists that at any stage in a child's
life, disruption of close bonds will have an influence on the child's total
adaptive functioning.

RELATED RESEARCH
At this time, I would like do discuss some research that I did some years
ago that was directed to both of the above questions. We were interested
in studying the impact of different environments on infants sensori-motor
development as measured by a scale of object permanence and the Cattell
test. We tested three groups of children - varying from very, very poor homes
to « advantaged » homes. We were curious to see how these same children
progressed, when at the age of three, they were again tested, using mainly
verbal measures. In other words was their continuity between sensori-motor
and language development? Would different environments influence the
childrens abilites? We were working within a Piagetian framework. We
knew that by the age of 3, children from different backgrounds performed
differently on language-based tests. We therefore hypothesized that if
language derived from sensori-motor development, the Piaget object scale
might pick up Socio-economic status differences during infancy.
The results : Our first hypothesis was wrong. Being very poor did not
seem to adversely affect the development of object constancy or other
sensori-motor activities. We concluded that being in a very poor home
did not affect the infant's experience with objects in the environment. We
also concluded that poor mothers did not differ in the attention or affection
the demonstrated to their infants. Very poor infants were as healthy and
competent, as infants from more advantaged homes.
The most important information came however when we were able to
retest the same children at the age of 3. Wallon, Piaget and all psychologists,
teachers, and parents know that between 2 and 3, children's language
performance shows enormous progress. A* 1Uei age of 3 when language items were
the most important-social class had become very important. The children of
the highly educated, middle-class mothers who read and spoke to their
children a great deal had much higher test scores than the children of the
very poor. These findings suggest that there is discontinuity between sensori-
motor and verbal performance in the same children. Furthermore, the
environment has a different impact on different functions. Therefore as
Wallon suggested, exploring the environmental influences on the child is
absolutely necessary if we are to understand the child. If Piaget's theory was
correct and language was based primarily on sensori-motor development,
then children who were developing well on sensori-motor tasks should have
proceeded to equal success in language skills. This was not the case. Other
research, indicates that language acquisition is most dependent on the
nature of the verbal interactions between caretakers and child, not on
previous acquisitions which may be necessary, but are not sufficient, to
explain subsequent development.
 329

ON EDUCATION
Both Piaget and Wallon have written about their ideas on education.
Some of these ideas and criticisms are shared, and these will be the first to be
discussed. Then we will see how each view of the child led to a different
concern regarding the needs for change in the educational system.
Both men believed that education was the means that society has for
creating its future citizens and that the institution of education reflects the
values and ideology of society. Both men have been very critical of
traditional education. They were critical of the role that the teacher played in
education : the role of the absolute authority whose job was the transmission
of knowledge to the passive, obedient and docile pupil. Both felt that
teachers ought not to be autocrats, who simply imparted the knowledge of
prior generations for the students to memorize. Both were against the dogma
of traditional education and were critical of the use of sterile text-books.
However although they both have been very critical of traditional education,
their ideas on what education should be differed in many ways, that reflect
their different conceptions of childhood.
Piaget believes that reforms in education must be based on the « new »
knowledge concerning the psychology of the child. This « new knowledge »
(he implicitly is refering to the work done at the Institute J. J. Rousseau over
the past 50 years) concerns the nature of child thought and the development
of intelligence in the child. Piaget states : « knowledge is derived from action,
not in the sense of simple associative responses but in the much deeper sense
of the assimilation of reality into the necessary and general coordination
of action. To know an object is to act upon it and to transform it... ». For
Piaget, then, the critical element in the new education is that the child's
learning should be an active process. The goal of education is not to fill the
child's head with endless bits of information to be memorized in a rote
fashion, but rather to encourage the child to be an inventor, someone who
actively discovers reality, rather than simply repeating old facts. Piaget's
concept of intelligence and of all thought is that it is fundamentally based
on action. For the young child this action is sensori-motor activity, which
forms the basis for later learning. For Piaget, as the child progresses and
learns language, the actions become interiorized so that by adolescence,
it is no longer necessary to manipulate objects directly to solve problems.
Even the most complex mathematical or physical concepts can ultimately
be reduced to the minds action on objects and relationships amongst objects.
He writes : « intelligence still consists of executing and coordinating actions,
though in an interiorized and reflexive form ».
Since all intelligence and particularly creativity and inventiveness are
based on « actions on things » Piaget insists that good education is oriented
towards developing in each child, the « experimental attitude ». In Piaget's
Utopia, I think, each child would be a scientist. Not that each would grow
up to « do science » as their work, but rather that all people would maintain
the curiosity, inventiveness and joy of discovery that one sees in children
who are in an environment that enourages their exploration of the laws of the
universeboth their immediate universe and at later ages, the broader
universe. Piaget emphasizes activity as the sine qua non of education, and the
appreciation of the child's developmental stage as an indispensable tool.
22
 330

It is interesting, as an American to see both the extent and the way that
Piaget's ideas have taken hold in the United States. It is clear from reading
Piaget's works that he does hope to have an effect on the way that educators
think about their task, the way that teachers should be trained and the goals
of education. I doubt that he ever intended to have the experiments he has
performed used as the basis of a teaching curriculum, and yet this is precisely
what has happened. Both public school classes as well as preschool
intervention classes have been designed based on the Piaget experiments.
Wallon, as indicated previously was also very critical of traditional
education. He wrote that traditional education was both class oriented and
very autocratic. He showed specifically how education was always influenced
by the ideology of the ruling class of the time. Traditional education he
stated was based on the notion that there was only one truth. The teachers
role in traditional education was therefore to teach this truth to the students,
who would memorize it and accept it. Traditional education had its main
tool, rote memorization by students.
Wallon, however was also critical of so called « progressive education ».
He found « progressive education to have some positive value », but also said
that the ideology of progressive education was riddled with contradiction.
On the one hand he said, it reflected the power needs of the bourgeoisie, and
therefore was still oriented towards the powerful class. Yet, the major theme
of progressive education was the importance of the individual. These two
themes are seen as a contradiction. He criticized the progressive educators
as being Utopian. Like other Utopians, they attacked one aspect of a system
and constructed a whole new system based on one specific criticism. For
instance he agrees with Montessori in that she found traditional education
to be overly abstract. However Wallon criticizes Montessori for being too
extreme in her solution, which was to base all education on sensory
education. Wallon criticized Montessori for only addressing one issue and
ignoring many of the other flaws. Wallon is critical of Montessori for
underestimating the importance of symbolic function, i.e. language as well
as for ignoring the personality of the child.
Wallon was also critical of Dewey for being overly idealistic. Dewey felt
that schools should be a microcosm of society in its ideal state. Since Dewey
believed in democracy, he believed that the schools should be « authentic
self-governing societies ». Wallon was very critical of this view. He believed
that to lead children to believe that they live in a democratic society, where
they are involved in decision making was being false, he felt that it was
incorrect to allow and encourage children to believe in their own power,
when in fact they were powerless.
Wallon, consistent with his views on the basic social nature of the child
was as concerned with what the child was learning about the structure of
society, as he was with what the child was learning about notions of physical
causality. Wallon discussed his acceptance of the educational philosophy
of Makarenko, which he said attempted to reconcile « the cultivation of the
individual » with « the integration of the student into a society... capable of
guaranteeing his full personal development ».
Thus for Wallon education, like all other institutions reflects not only
the technology of its time, but the philosophy and class bias, and it was his
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hope and expectation that in a classless society, both the individual and the
individual as a member of society could be fully developped.

CONCLUSION
We have briefly compared the views of these two great psychologists on
a variety of issues. We would like to close with some current considerations.
We are fortunate, in that Piaget continues to be active and writing
stimulating books and articles. Among his most recent works are : a book on
structuralism and articles in the American Psychologist and the (American)
Annual Review of Psychology (1979). Piaget's recent work focuses primarily
on the relation between psychology, philosophy and science and
mathematics. Piaget, now particularly seems most interested in epistemology.
Wallon, as we know died in 1962. Some people believe that a scientific
theory is valid if it helps clarify facts. It is tempting to think of Wallon's
ideas as theory and demonstrate the facts that it might explain. However,
Wallon was adamant in stating that he did not want his work to be viewed
as a theroy ! He feared the potential rigidity and dogma that evolve from
« a theory ». Therefore out of respect for Wallon, I would like to conclude by
indicating the relevance of some of his ideas to contemporary research.
1) The use of tests : Wallon used 12 tests because he felt that they were useful
diagnostic tools. However, he also warned against the possibility of tests
being abused to discriminate against certain groups of children. Wallon's
concerns were prophetic ! In the 1970's in America, we witnessed the recent
Jensen disaster, Arthur Jensen claimed that 12 tests demonstrated « racial »
differences in children. He claimed that the tests measured in innate
«intelligence », and since test scores of white and black children differed, white
children were more intelligent than blacks. Leon Kamin, an American
psychologist (Kamin 197 ) did a brilliant job of exposing the fallacies in
Jensen's arguments as well as the non-existence of some data quoted by
Jensen. Wallon's concern was that the 12 tests could be used as instruments
of oppression proved to be true.
Perhaps, the most important of Wallon's ideas was that concerning the
social nature of the child. Wallon believed that from infancy on, humans are
social beings. There is some very interesting research taking place in the
U.S. now (Klaus and Kennel) that indicates that mothers who are allowed
body contact with their infants in the first hour after birth, show closer
attachment behavior months later. This research suggests that both the
mother and the infant are involved in meaningful social contact immediately
after birth.
Other research is being done to-day on altruism in young infants. There
is now evidence that by the age of two some babies are already able to
comfort others who are crying or in pain. Unlike Piaget's egocentric child,
these youngsters, under two have been observed to offer a crying baby a
cookie, or a tissue to wipe the tears. These little ones conform to Wallon's
ideas about « playing different roles » they can be, not only the baby, but
the care-taking adult as well. Increasing evidence from infancy studies of
young children indicate that Wallon's approach to the child had great
merit.
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SUMMARY
In this short introduction to the life and work of Henri Wallon, we have
compared the ideas of Wallon and Piaget. We have discussed their ideas
concerning the concept of the child, stages of development, language and
education. We can thank Piaget for drawing our attention to the stages and
mechanisms of cognitive growth in the child. By studying this one aspect of
development, he traced the childs ability to interact with her environment
in increasingly complex ways.
However, it was Wallon who insisted that cognition should not be
studied in isolation. He insisted that the child's development must be viewed
in terms of the interaction of emotional as well as cognitive factors. He also
insisted that the child is basically a social organism, and that her interaction
with the environment affects all aspects of development, at all times.
We noted that Piaget and Wallon considered, criticized and respected
each others work. Piaget' s work has become very popular throughout the
world. We would like to think that Wallon' s work with its emphasis on the
child and its relation to the society in which it grows will become as widely
considered in the English speaking, as well as other areas of the world.
Wallon, a man before his time, wrote about issues which are today of great
importance to all of us, who are concerned with the health and mental
growth of all children.

REFERENCES
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