Jean Piaget Quotes

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.

To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active.

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

True interest appears when the self identifies itself with ideas or objects, when it finds in them a means of expression and they become a necessary form of fuel for its activity.

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 is judged to be higher.

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

Play is the work of childhood.

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

What is desired is that the teacher ceased being a lecturer, satisfied with transmitting ready-made solutions. His role should rather be that of a mentor stimulating initiative and research.

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

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

As you know, Bergson pointed out that there is no such thing as disorder but rather two sorts of order, geometric and living.

Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society . . . but for me and no one else, education means making creators. . . . You have to make inventors, innovators...not conformists

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

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.

The more we try to improve our schools, the heavier the teaching task becomes; and the better our teaching methods the more difficult they are to apply.

Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity.

Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand, that which we allow him to discover for himself will remain with him visible for the rest of his life.

Punishment renders autonomy of conscience impossible.

Experience precedes understanding.

Teaching means creating situations where structures can be discovered.

The most developed science remains a continual becoming

Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what is already known? Or should we try to develop creative and innovative minds, capable of discovery from the preschool age on, throughout life?

It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.

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

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

Children require long, uniterrupted periods of play and exploration

I could not think without writing.

Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves.

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

What the genetic epistemology proposes is discovering the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, since its elementary forms, following to the next levels, including also the scientific knowledge.

During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions.

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.

We learn more when we are compelled to invent.

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

How can we, with our adult minds, know what will be interesting? If you follow the child...you can find out something new.

Chance... in the accommodation peculiar to sensorimotor intelligence, plays the same role as in scientific discovery. It is only useful to the genius and its revelations remain meaningless to the unskilled.

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

Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures.

The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done-men who are creative, inventive, and discovers. The second goal of education is to form minds which can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered.

Play is the answer to how anything new comes about.

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

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.

To understand is to invent.

This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.

Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.

Moral autonomy appears when the mind regards as necessary an ideal that is independent of all external pressures.

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