To understand is to invent. Jean Piaget More Quotes by Jean Piaget More Quotes From Jean Piaget In certain circumstances where he experiments in new types of conduct by cooperating with his equals, the child is already an adult. There is an adult in every child and a child in every adult. ... There exist in the child certain attitudes and beliefs which intellectual development will more and more tend to eliminate: there are others which will acquire more and more importance. The later are not derived from the former but are partly antagonistic to them. Jean Piaget intellectualattitudechildren The child who defines a lie as being a "naughty word" knows perfectly well that lying consists in not speaking the truth. He is not, therefore, mistaking one thing for another, he is simply identifying them one with another by what seems to us a quaint extension of the word "lie". Jean Piaget naughtylyingchildren The self thus becomes aware of itself, at least in its practical action, and discovers itself as a cause among other causes and as an object subject to the same laws as other objects. Jean Piaget causesselflaw Moral autonomy appears when the mind regards as necessary an ideal that is independent of all external pressures. Jean Piaget independentpressuremind During the earliest stages of thought, accommodation remains on the surface of physical as well as social experience. Jean Piaget accommodationsstagesocial For the fundamental fact of human psychology is that society, instead of remaining almost entirely inside the individual organism as in the case of animals prompted by their instincts, becomes crystallized almost entirely outside the individuals. In other words, social rules, as Durkheim has so powerfully shown, whether they be linguistic, moral, religious, or legal, etc., cannot be constituted, transmitted or preserved by means of an internal biological heredity, but only through the external pressure exercised by individuals upon each other. Jean Piaget religiousanimalmean Every acquisition of accommodation becomes material for assimilation, but assimilation always resists new accommodations. Jean Piaget assimilationaccommodationsacquisition The more the schemata are differentiated, the smaller the gap between the new and the familiar becomes, so that novelty, instead of constituting an annoyance avoided by the subject, becomes a problem and invites searching. Jean Piaget gapsnoveltyproblem It was while teaching philosophy that I saw how easily one can say ... what one wants to say. ... In fact, I became particularly aware if the dangers of speculation ... It's so much easier than digging out the facts. You sit in your office and build a system. But with my training in biology, I felt this kind of undertaking precarious. Jean Piaget officeteachingphilosophy Scientific knowledge is in perpetual evolution; it finds itself changed from one day to the next. Jean Piaget educationalone-dayinspirational At one time, many philosophers held that faultless "laws of thought" were somehow inherent, a priori, in the very nature of mind. This belief was twice shaken in the past century; first when Russell and his successors showed how the logic men employ can be defective, and later when Freud and Piaget started to reveal the tortuous ways in which our minds actually develop. Jean Piaget lawmenpast To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active. Jean Piaget wayideasthinking If logic itself is created rather than being inborn, it follows that the first task of education is to form reasoning. Jean Piaget logictasksfirsts The most developed science remains a continual becoming Jean Piaget remainsbecoming The majority of parents are poor psychologists and give their children the most questionable moral trainings. It is perhaps in this domain that one realized most how keenly how immoral it can be to believe too much in morality, and how much more precious is a little humanity than all the rules in the world. Jean Piaget givingbelievechildren Much research in psychology has been more concerned with how large groups of people behave than about the particular ways in which each individual person thinks... too statistical. I find this disappointing because, in my view of the history of psychology, far more was learned, for example, when Jean Piaget spent several years observing the ways that three children developed, or when Sigmund Freud took several years to examine the thinking of a rather small number of patients. Jean Piaget small-numberschildrenthinking If a baby really has no awareness of himself and is totally thing-directed and at the same time all his states of mind are projected onto things, our second paradox makes sense: on the one hand, thought in babies can be viewed as pure accommodation or exploratory movements, but on the other this very same thought is only one, long, completely autistic waking dream. Jean Piaget dreambabyhands If mutual respect does derive from unilateral respect, it does so by opposition. Jean Piaget mutual-respectoppositiondoe Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions. Jean Piaget abstractionindividualaction In other words, knowledge of the external world begins with an immediate utilisation of things, whereas knowledge of self is stopped by this purely practical and utilitarian contact. Jean Piaget contactselfworld
