Jean Piaget Summary

Jean Piaget was a developmental psychologist, philosopher, and educator born near the end of the 1800s in Europe; he profoundly influenced contemporary behavioral thought and modern psychology. Dr. Piaget studied and wrote on many topics including human intelligence, sociological development, child growth and development, as well as various cognitive issues. Piaget published a plethora of psychological journals and abstracts in addition to many books.

Piaget, although a constructionist, was an empiricist like Locke who believed that knowledge comes principally through the five senses.

In the common view, the external world is entirely separate from the subject, although it encloses the subject’s own body. Any object knowledge, then, appears to be simply the result of a set of perceptive recordings, motor associations, verbal descriptions, and the like, which all participate in the producing a sort of figurative copy or “functional copy” (in Hull’s terminology) of objects and the connections between them. (Piaget, 1976, p. 12)

Piaget’s theory taught that subject and object were connected together in a relationship that was forged in the developmental process; therefore, cognitive learning, which equals knowledge, is bonded together with the behavioral actions of the subject. “Piaget makes a distinction between development and learning – development being a spontaneous process tied to embryogenesis, learning being provoked by external situations” (Piaget, 1964, p. 176). Piaget supposed four stages of development – sensori-motor, pre-operational, concrete operations, and formal operations. Piaget elaborated his cognitive development ideas with the following classifications: maturation, experience, social transmission, and equilibration (Piaget, 1964, p. 176).

The process of Piaget’s theory is similar to Bloom’s teaching on taxonomy. Piaget stated: “In order to know objects, the subject must act upon them, and therefore transform them: he must displace, connect, combine, take apart, and reassemble them” (Piaget, 1976, p. 12). These concepts resemble Bloom’s table of the cognitive domain – knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

Jean Piaget Critique

Piaget was a fascinating man and a brilliant scholar who did change modern child psychology forever; however, his theory was fundamentally flawed as he left out any latitude for God, and he did not believe in Biblical truth. While it is impossible, because of space limitations, to address all that Piaget proposed and propagated throughout his lifetime of research and instructing, a few ideas associated with his main theory will be addressed in this paper.

Piaget did not believe in the Bible’s teaching that God was The Authority and that structured rules for society develop from God or the authority of parents. “For Piaget, the best thing adults can do to foster moral development is to get out of the way” (Haidt, 2008, p. 66).  Piaget also disagreed with Scripture when it comes to the idea of the father being the head of the home. As stated by Haidt,

Piaget’s child-centered and antiauthoritarian views harmonize with the nurturant parent ideal that Lakoff said is the foundational metaphor of liberal thought. In fact, Piaget’s developmental story is the liberal-progress narrative writ small: Children start off being oppressed by their elders, but they come together to help each other throw off their shackles and claim their places as autonomous moral agents. (Haidt, 2008, p. 66)

Piaget also held the position that moral absolutes are not given by God but are created by practical exchanges through man’s interpersonal relationships. “Both morality and logic are fired in the crucible of the spontaneous give and take, the interplay of thought and action, which takes place in peer-peer interactions” (Flavell, 1963, p. 296).

While Piaget was well educated, respected and had a broad repertoire of publications, he was a progressivist like Dewey and has taken American psychology and education further down the road of secular humanism and postmodernism.

          

References

Haidt, J. (2008). Morality. Perspectives on psychological science, 3(1), 65-72.

Flavell, J. H. (1963). The developmental psychology of Jean Piaget.

Piaget, J. (1964). Part I: Cognitive development in children: Piaget development and

learning. Journal of research in science teaching, 2(3), 176-186.

Piaget, J. (1976). Piaget’s theory. In Piaget and his school (pp. 11-23). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.