Piaget, Jean

Early Life and Career

Jean Piaget was born in Neuchatel, Switzerland, on August 9, 1896. His father, Arthur, was a professor of medieval literature at the local university. His mother, [Page 830]Rebecca Jackson, was intelligent, energetic, and apparently neurotic. The household was not a completely happy one, largely because of her influence (Piaget, 1952). Jean was a precocious child who was very interested in nature. He published his first article, on an albino sparrow, when he was only 10 years old. Throughout his teen years, he continued to write on nature topics, particularly mollusks. When he was still in high school, he was offered a position as curator of the mollusk collection at a museum in Geneva, an offer that he declined because of his young age.

Although Piaget's earliest interests were in biology, he also read extensively in philosophy and to a lesser degree in psychology. At first, his appreciation for the combined fields of philosophy and biology convinced him to devote his life to a search for the biological explanation of knowledge (Evans, 1973, p. 111). But, eventually, he concluded that they were not enough to answer the questions he had in mind. After receiving his PhD in natural science from the University of Neuchatel, at the age of 22, he traveled to Zurich in the hopes of working in a psychology laboratory. While in Zurich, he studied under Eugen Bleuler and heard lectures by Carl Jung. He also had the opportunity to work in the psychology laboratory of G. E. Lipps, but still, he was not satisfied.

In 1919, Piaget traveled to Paris to take courses at the Sorbonne. In Paris, he was introduced to Theodore Simon, who had worked with Alfred Binet on the first successful intelligence tests, the Binet-Simon Scales. (Binet had died in 1911.) Meeting Simon was a pivotal moment for Piaget. He agreed to restandardize Cyril Burt's reasoning test on French children, but when he began his work, he was surprised at the direction it took. He found he was more interested in the wrong answers that the children gave. Those answers gave him insight into the reasoning ability of the children, and he began to engage them in conversation to better understand their reasoning processes. Eventually, he concluded that the fundamental problem in understanding intelligence was to comprehend the different kinds of thinking used by children of various ages (Ginsburg & Opper, 1988). At that time, he essentially mapped out his life's work, and he stayed with that plan for the next 60 years.

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