Explore Quotes by Jean Piaget

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Play is the work of childhood.

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

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.

The most developed science remains a continual becoming

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

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.

Teaching means creating situations where structures can be discovered.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.