Explore Quotes by Jean Piaget

With regard to moral rules, the child submits more or less completely in intention to the rules laid down for him, but these, remaining, as it were, external to the subject's conscience, do not really transform his conduct.

Before playing with his equals, the child is influenced by his parents. He is subjected from his cradle to a multiplicity of regulations, and even before language he becomes conscious of certain obligations.

Everyone knows that at the age of 11-12, children have a marked impulse to form themselves into groups and that the respect paid to the rules and regulations of their play constitutes an important feature of this social life.

Logical activity is not the whole of intelligence. One can be intelligent without being particularly logical.

Play is the answer to the question, 'How does anything new come about?'

Egocentrism appears to us as a form of behavior intermediate between purely individual and socialized behavior.

The child often sees only what he already knows. He projects the whole of his verbal thought into things. He sees mountains as built by men, rivers as dug out with spades, the sun and moon as following us on our walks.

The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things.

I could not think without writing.

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

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.

Everytime we teach a child something, we prevent him from inventing it _x000D_ himself.

Children require long, uniterrupted periods of play and exploration

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.

Experience precedes understanding.

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?

I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother's poor mental health.

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.

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.

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

Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.