55 quotes on childhood and learning by Jean Piaget

Valuable reflections and thoughts of the Swiss psychologist.

Jean Piaget is one of the most renowned psychologists and researchers for his contributions to the psychology of development and learning. and learning psychology. In his famous theory he proposed several stages of cognitive development that all individuals go through.

• You can learn more about this in our article: "Jean Piaget's 4 stages of cognitive development".

Piaget's best quotes

Throughout his life, Piaget uttered several quotes that have gone down in history.. In this article we review them.

• However, before you can review the most important aspects of his contributions in this post: "The Learning Theory of Jean Piaget".

Now, let's get started!

1. Scientific thinking, then, is not momentary, it is not a static instance, but rather a process.

As a scientist, Piaget contributed significantly to the study of cognitive development and intelligence.

2. When you teach a child something, you forever take away his opportunity to discover it for himself.

Children are curious, and when curiosity leads them to investigate, the experiential learning that occurs is truly enriching.

3. Possibility... in the proper accommodation of sensory-motor intelligence, it plays the same role as in scientific discovery. It is useful only to genius and its revelations remain meaningless to unskilled workers.

The sensorimotor period is one of the stages of Piaget's theory, in which the greatest achievement is the notion of the permanent object.

4. On the one hand, there are individual actions, such as pulling, pushing, touching, rubbing. These are those individual actions that give rise most of the time to the abstraction of objects.

A great phrase from Piaget, abstraction is prior to the instrument of generalization and the child learns by manipulating objects. Piaget always thought that human beings are active in learning.

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

Scientific thinking is not static, it is constantly developing.

6. Look, I have no opinion on pedagogy. The problem of education interests me very much, because it is my impression that there is much to reform and transform, but I think that the role of the psychologist consists above all in providing facts that pedagogy can use, and not in putting himself in their place to give them advice.

Pedagogy can benefit enormously from psychology.

7. The essential functions of the mind consist of understanding and invention, i.e. the construction of structures by structuring reality.

Creativity plays an important role in learning.

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

Assimilation is one of the most important concepts revolving around Piagetian theory.

9. Knowledge is, then, a system of transformations that become progressively adequate.

Learning is cumulative and develops, as Piaget explains.

10. Our problem, from the point of view of psychology and from the point of view of genetic epistemology, is to explain how the transition is made from a lower level of knowledge to a level that appears to be higher.

As in the previous point, a quote on cumulative learning.

11. I have always detested any deviation from reality, an attitude that I related to my mother's poor mental health.

A reflection carried out by Piaget, in which it is possible to appreciate a certain touch of irony.

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

What we see determines our thinking, but our thinking also determines how we interpret what we see.

13. The main objective of education in schools should be the creation of men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical, verify and not accept everything that is offered to them.

Piaget, in clear defense of creativity and active learning.

14. I could not think without writing

A great quote that invites reflection

15. What genetic epistemology proposes is to discover the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, from their elementary forms, following the following levels, including also scientific knowledge

Piaget, making clear reference to genetic epistemology.

16. If you want to be creative, stay partly as a child, with the creativity and inventiveness that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.

Children have a curious mindset in which they do not judge but are open to constant learning.. Something that many adults should learn

17. Relationships between parents and children are certainly not only those of restraint. There are spontaneous mutual affection, which range from first asking the child for acts of generosity and even sacrifice, to very touching manifestations that are in no way prescribed. And here, undoubtedly, is the starting point for the morality of good that we will see developing alongside the morality of right or duty, and that in some people completely replaces the morality of right or duty, and that in some people completely replaces the morality of good.

Parents are the most important educational agents, since they educate their children in such important subjects as morals and values.

18. Good pedagogy should confront children with situations in which they experiment in the broadest sense of the word: trying things out to see what happens, handling objects, handling symbols, raising questions, seeking their own answers, reconciling what they find on one occasion with what they find on another by comparing their achievements with those of other children.

Children are active learners, explorers at their best.

19. If an individual is intellectually passive, he will fail to be morally free.

Learners must be explorers who construct their own cognitive development.

20. In other words, knowledge of the outside world begins with an immediate utilization of things, while knowledge of oneself is arrested by this purely practical and utilitarian contact.

Experiential learning is a very powerful form of learning. More so than rote learning.

21. Education, for most people, means trying to make the child look like the typical adult of their society... But for me, education means making creators... You have to make inventors, innovators, non-conformists

Culture tries to shape our thoughts, our motivations and even our expectations. It is possible to see this in an educational system that does not favor creativity at all. Fortunately, there are many psychologists and pedagogues who try to change this way of working.

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

Problems and the attempt to solve them stimulates our creativity and our intelligence.

23. What role would books and manuals have in this school? The ideal school would not have compulsory textbooks for students, but only reference works that would be used freely... the only indispensable textbooks would be those used by the teacher.

Piaget referring to what his ideal school would be like, the one that would benefit students' learning.

24. To express the same idea in another form, I believe that human knowledge is essentially active.

Once again, this psychologist's vision is clear. We humans construct our own learning.

25. Logic and mathematics are nothing more than specialized linguistic structures.

Linguistic structures are the basis of our knowledge, Piaget asserts.

26. It is with children that we have the best opportunity to study the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so on.

Children were the participants in Piaget's studies.

27. To understand is to invent

If we do not understand something, we will not be able to go beyond it and be creative.

28. Children have a real understanding of what they only invent themselves, and every time we try to teach them something too quickly, we prevent them from reinventing themselves.

We must not impose learning, otherwise we will provoke memorization instead of understanding. Learning must be constructed by us.

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

Each stage of learning has its moment, according to Piaget.

30. The second objective of education is to form minds that can be critical, that can verify and not accept everything that is offered to them. The great danger today are slogans, collective opinions, ready-made trends of thought. We have to be able to oppose them individually, to criticize, to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong.

Piaget was always an advocate of critical thinking.

31. The main goal of education is to create people capable of doing new things, and not simply to repeat what other generations have done.

People must be able to actively carry out their cognitive development.

32. Knowledge cannot be a copy, since it is always a relationship between subject and object.

Piaget is one of the greatest exponents of constructionism, and this quote shows it.and this quote makes it clear.

33. This does not mean that logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.

Another clear reference to constructivist theory, where Piaget was one of the most representative figures.

34. Knowing reality implies constructing systems in continuous transformation that correspond, more or less, to reality

Knowledge, we construct it in order to convert it into our reality.

35. Thereafter, the universe is constructed in a set of permanent objects connected by causal relations that are independent of the subject and are placed in the time and space of the subject.

The notion of the permanent object is one of the great achievements of the sensorimotor sentence.

36. A learned truth is but a half-learned truth, while the whole truth must be conquered, reconstructed or rediscovered by the learner himself.

A quote that speaks of truth and encourages free interpretation.

37. Everything a child is taught is prevented from inventing or discovering it.

The adult can provide tools for the child to learn, but it is the child who builds it.

38. Intelligence, the most plastic and at the same time the most permanent structural balance of behavior, is essentially a system of vital operations.

There is a curious paradox between the stability of intelligence and its capacity to adapt to the environment.

39. Every psychological explanation, sooner or later, ends up resting on logic or biology.

Mental processes do not exist outside of Biological processes outside of a logical analysis of their content.

40. To develop human intelligence it is essential to know mathematical logic.

These dimensions of knowledge are an essential part of the intellect, according to Piaget.

41. We must start from this dual character of intelligence as something both biological and logical at the same time

The intellect exists thanks to the activity of nerve cells, but also thanks to the rules of logic.

42. To explain well the psychological phenomenon it is necessary to study its line of formation.

What happens in the human mind is the fruit of a constant evolution and maturation..

43. There are many similarities between the development of knowledge in a child, on the one hand, and the development of knowledge in the scientific world on the other.

Piaget establishes a comparison between both ways of extracting knowledge.

44. The fundamental idea of my theory is almost always misinterpreted.

This author and researcher warns of the need to pay attention to the nuances of his work.

45. Human knowledge is always an assimilation or an interpretation.

Piaget emphasizes the importance of these learning mechanisms.

46. Structure is the source of deductive ability.

Deduction is based on formal rules.

47. If knowledge were innate then it would be present in infants and other animals.

A sentence about the possibility that there are principles of knowing that exist innately.

48. Problems are solved according to different levels of knowledge.

Each stage of cognitive development offers different solutions.

49. It is necessary to study how the fact of attaining new knowledge opens the mind to new possibilities.

Learning involves qualitative leaps in our level of knowledge..

50. The development of intelligence is a sequence of deductive operations.

Piaget believed in the importance of deductive reasoning as an engine of learning.

51. The first clear indication in the development of knowledge is constant creativity.

Lateral thinking is a fundamental aspect of intelligence.

52. Operations are transformations that are reversible

In the mental games that make up learning, operations are always reversible.

53. I am a constructivist because I am constantly constructing or helping to construct knowledge.

A sentence about Piaget's philosophical foundations.

54. Mathematics is constantly under construction, and we can see this even in a child's day-to-day life.

The development of mathematical ability is evolving.

55. A child never draws what he sees, he draws his interpretation of it.

Piaget questions the idea of drawing objectively.