Jean Piaget Quotes - Page 2

I could not think without writing.

Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity.

Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.

To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active.

Punishment renders autonomy of conscience impossible.

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.

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

During the earliest stages of thought, accommodation remains on the surface of physical as well as social experience.

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.

Moral autonomy appears when the mind regards as necessary an ideal that is independent of all external pressures.

It is as his own mind comes into contact with others that truth will begin to acquire value in the child's eyes and will consequently become a moral demand that can be made upon him. As long as the child remains egocentric, truth as such will fail to interest him and he will see no harm in transposing facts in accordance with his desires.

The relations between parents and children are certainly not only those of constraint. There is spontaneous mutual affection, which from the first prompts the child to acts of generosity and even of self-sacrifice, to very touching demonstrations which are in no way prescribed. And here no doubt is the starting point for that morality of good which we shall see developing alongside of the morality of right or duty, and which in some persons completely replaces it.

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.

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

The child is a realist in every domain of thought, and it is therefore natural that in the moral sphere he should lay more stress on the external, tangible element than on the hidden motive.

I am convinced that there is no sort of boundary between the living and the mental or between the biological and the psychological. From the moment an organism takes account of a previous experience and adapts to a new situation, that very much resembles psychology.

The majority of parents are poor psychologists and give their children the most questionable moral trainings. It is perhaps in this domain that one realized most how keenly how immoral it can be to believe too much in morality, and how much more precious is a little humanity than all the rules in the world.

Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process.

Accommodation of mental structures to reality implies the existence of assimilatory schemata apart from which any structure would be impossible.

In certain circumstances where he experiments in new types of conduct by cooperating with his equals, the child is already an adult. There is an adult in every child and a child in every adult. ... There exist in the child certain attitudes and beliefs which intellectual development will more and more tend to eliminate: there are others which will acquire more and more importance. The later are not derived from the former but are partly antagonistic to them.

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.

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

Mixture of assimilation to earlier schemas and adaptation to the actual conditions of the situation is what defines motor intelligence. But and this is where rules come into existence as soon as a balance is established between adaptation and assimilation, the course of conduct adopted becomes crystallized and ritualized. New schemas are even established which the child looks for and retains with care, as though they were obligatory or charged with efficacy.

The most developed science remains a continual becoming

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