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.
Jean PiagetRead
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?
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote questions whether education is focused solely on existing knowledge or if it promotes creativity and innovation in children.
Jean Piaget's quote highlights the importance of nurturing creativity and innovation in children's education. He challenges the conventional approach that emphasizes rote learning of established knowledge, advocating instead for an educational framework that encourages exploration, critical thinking, and discovery from an early age. This approach not only benefits children during their formative years but also equips them with skills that are vital throughout their lives.
Themes
EducationCreativityInnovationChildrenLearning
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on child development, this quote can prompt a discussion on teaching methodologies.
More from Jean Piaget
All quotes →Logical activity is not the whole of intelligence. One can be intelligent without being particularly logical.
Jean PiagetRead
Children's games constitute the most admirable social institutions. The game of marbles, for instance, as played by boys, contains an extremely complex system of rules - that is to say, a code of laws, a jurisprudence of its own.
Jean PiagetRead
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.
Jean PiagetRead
Play is the work of childhood.
Jean PiagetRead
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.
Jean PiagetRead
Similar quotes
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
George SantayanaRead
Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.
Jeanette WintersonRead
Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.
PlatoRead
Universities are not here to be mediums for the coercion of other people, they're here to be mediums for the free exchange of ideas.
A. Bartlett GiamattiRead
Putting a computer in front of a child and expecting it to teach him is like putting a book under his pillow, only more expensive
Joseph WeizenbaumRead
There exists one book, which, to my taste, furnishes the happiest treatise of natural education. What then is this marvelous book? Is it Aristotle? Is it Pliny, is it Buffon? No-it is Robinson Crusoe.
Jean-Jacques RousseauRead