We explain who Jean Piaget was and what his main contributions were to psychology and educational sciences.
Jean Piaget is considered the father of genetic epistemology and one of the greatest scholars of the human learning process.
Who was Jean Piaget?
Jean Piaget was a Swiss biologist and psychologist, considered one of the great scholars of the human learning process and a key figure in the emergence of developmental psychology.
Piaget was the first student of the human mind to formulate a systematic study of learning in childhood, which he initially carried out with his own children. Besides, His work is key to understanding the theoretical and philosophical processes that took place in the first half of the 20th century. in the West.
He is also considered the father of genetic epistemology and, by extension, genetic psychology: disciplines that search in the child psyche for the answer to various general psychological problems. His ideas were influential in the fields of sociology, psychology, logic, biology and education.and today numerous educational and research institutions pay tribute to him.
Youth and education of Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget was born in Neuchatel, a city in French-speaking Switzerland, on August 9, 1896. His father, Arthur Piaget, was a well-known professor of medieval literature at the University of Neuchatel, and his mother, Rebecca Suzanne Jackson, came from a family metallurgical.
The family home was wealthy and Jean turned out to be an exceptional and precocious child. From an early age he cultivated a great interest in biology, and especially in zoology..
It was no surprise, then, when he undertook his studies in natural sciences at the University of Neuchatel, where In addition to zoology, a field in which he completed his doctorate in 1918, he showed interest in philosophy and psychology.. This was followed by a brief stay at the University of Zurich, where he discovered psychoanalysis and was a student of Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) and Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939).
He subsequently embarked for Paris, where he spent two years studying at the Sorbonne, and then working with Hans Lipps (1889-1941) and Alfred Binet (1857-1911) in the area of child psychological testing. There he began to take an interest in children’s reasoning. and especially because of the errors that were frequently repeated between different children of the same age, but which the older children no longer made.
At that time, a completely new idea for the time began to form in his mind: that the reasoning processes of children and adults could be substantially different. This was of utmost importance in his later work.In 1920 he collaborated in the design of new intelligence tests and, the following year, he began to publish his observations.
The return to Switzerland and the beginning of his investigations
Jean and his wife Valentine had three children, whom Piaget studied during their early years.
Piaget returned to Geneva in 1921 to join the Rousseau Institute as director of research. There he developed a good part of his initial theories. In 1923 He married Valentine Châtenay, with whom he later had three children: Lucienne, Laurent and Jacqueline.whom Piaget studied from birth until their acquisition of language.
Piaget was interested in understanding how a child’s mind is formed and what stages it goes through in the process.His observations in Paris had led him to understand that the child’s mind continually creates and recreates its model of reality, incorporating simple elements into more complex patterns at each stage. In 1923 he published his first major contribution to this field of study: Language and thought in young children.
In his study, Piaget devised simple challenges and problems to present to children, and he took note and analyzed the errors made, looking for patterns. These studies later led him to formulate his concept of “genetic epistemology.”that is, a natural calendar according to which the child’s mind develops, from one stage to the next successively.
In 1925 Piaget joined the University of Neuchatel as a professor, following in his father’s footsteps, where he taught psychology, sociology and the history of science; and in 1929 he was hired at the University of Genoa, as a professor of the history of scientific thought and child psychology. The latter was a professorship that he taught until the day of his death..
There are many popular myths regarding Piaget’s children, many of which maintain that the psychological experiments conducted by their father were abusive, cruel, or caused them a tormented childhood and an early death through suicide. All this is the result of popular inventivenessPiaget’s experiences are recorded in his diaries and publications, and were witnessed by family members and colleagues, and there are no traces of torture or inappropriate behaviour. His three sons lived normal lives in Switzerland and have been interviewed on numerous occasions.
Piaget’s four stages of development
Based on his studies of the development of the child’s psyche, through monitoring his children’s games and the design and application of different tests, Piaget formulated his Theory of Cognitive Development. There identified the four stages or stages that the mind goes through in its early development:
- THE SENSORIOMOTOR STAGEThe initial stage of cognitive development spans from birth to the acquisition of language by the infant. It is characterized by the recognition of the world through physical interaction, that is, touching, grabbing, walking and feeling.. The senses of sight, touch and hearing are key to differentiating one’s own body from the rest of the environment, and in the acquisition of what Piaget called “object permanence,” that is, the awareness that things are still there despite not being perceived. According to Piaget, this stage includes six phases:
- Simple reflex phasewhich runs from birth to six weeks of age, and is characterized by coordination and action through reflex: sucking objects in the mouth, following objects with the eyes, and closing the hand when something comes into contact with the palm.
- Phase of first habits and primary circular reactionswhich goes from six weeks to four months of age, and is characterized by the appearance of a new behavioral pattern that is added to the reflexes: the reproduction of actions that occur by chance.
- Secondary circular reactions phase, which goes from four months to eight months of age, and is characterized by the development of the first habits, in which the infant carries out actions that he recognizes as the cause of pleasurable results. At this stage he distinguishes between the ends and the means necessary to achieve them.
- Coordination phase of secondary circular reaction stages, which ranges from eight months to one year of age, and is characterized by coordination between hand and eye, as well as between schemes and intentionality. Here appears logic and what Piaget called “first appropriate intelligence.”
- Tertiary circular reaction phase, which ranges from one year to one and a half years of age, and is characterized by the appearance of novelty and curiosity. Infants are intrigued by objects and what they can offer, which is why Piaget called this phase the “young scientist” phase.
- Phase of internalization of schemeswhich goes from one and a half to two years of age, and is characterized by the emergence of creativity and the development of the ability to understand the most primitive forms and symbols.
- THE PREOPERATIONAL STAGEThe second stage of the development process described by Piaget covers from the appearance of language, around two years of age, until approximately seven years of age. It is characterized by the appearance of language, although children are not yet able to mentally manage information. and to observe things from a point of view other than one’s own. Piaget described this stage through the analysis of children’s play, and noted that it focused on the handling of symbols and the imaginary transformation of some objects into others (a cardboard as a table, a box as a chair, etc.).
The child at this stage is capable of using magical thinking, although he remains strongly egocentric. Its development, according to Piaget, includes two successive substages:- Substage of symbolic functionswhich covers between two and four years of age, and It is characterized by the appearance of symbolic and imaginative thinking (for example, imaginary friends), and what Piaget called “precautionary thinking”: the use of one’s own ideas or points of view to understand the rest of the cause-effect relationships in the world.
- Intuitive thinking substagewhich covers between four and seven years of age, and It is characterized by the appearance of curiosity and the desire to understand everything.: “Why?” and “How does it come?” tend to be frequently asked questions. Children are also able to remember, imagine and understand objects mentally, without having them in front of them.
- THE CONCRETE OPERATIONAL STAGEThe third stage of the cognitive development process according to Piaget spans between the ages of seven and eleven approximately. It is characterized by the appropriate use of logic and the incorporation of inductive reasoningChildren still have trouble dealing with the abstract and the hypothetical, but their thought patterns begin to resemble those of an adult. At this stage, egocentrism also begins to give way and social values such as love appear.
- THE FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGEThe last stage described by Piaget covers the period from approximately eleven years of age to adulthood. Is characterized for the logical handling of symbols in relation to abstract ideasand the capacity for hypothetical and deductive reasoning. Metacognition (that is, thinking about the way one thinks) makes its appearance here, as does learning through systematic trial and error methods, in a logical and planned manner.
One of the questions that Piaget tried to answer throughout his career was how these stages were inscribed in human nature. For example, in 1967 he explored the possibility that RNA was the biological repository of these learning schemes: a hypothesis that could not be proven and from which he would later move away.
The foundation of the CIEG
Piaget’s scientific contributions earned him, among many others, the Erasmus Prize in 1972.
After 1930, Piaget devoted himself fully to psychology. In 1936 he joined the University of Lausanne as a professor and was editor of different academic publications in the area, such as Archives of Psychology (“Psychology Archives”) and Swiss Journal of Psychology (“Swiss Journal of Psychology”). Additionally, he received an honorary doctorate from Harvard University, the first…