Piagetian Thought

Jean Piaget (18961980) was one of the 20th century's most influential educational theorists, with a particular emphasis on how children learn. He was not just a learning theorist though; he was alsoand indeed foremosta philosopher and logician, theoretical biologist, developmental psychologist, and cognitivist. His magnum opus is [Page 653]Biology and Knowledge, followed by his Behavior and Evolution. In these, he lays out his “genetic epistemology,” where he talks of the process of cognitive development in terms of transformations. These transformations hold importance for curricularists.

For Piaget, transformative development in humans (children especially) was development that moved actions (and reactions to actions) from one stage or level to a new, higher stage or level. Such a hierarchal process was allied with (and indeed may have been heavily influenced by) his PhD study on how mollusks (snails) reacted to a change in their environment. Piaget observed the snails did not react immediately to a change in environment; rather they assimilated the environmental change into their own, patterned ways of operation. At a certain, undetermined point, though, enough environmental change encouraged the mollusks to accommodate themselves to the environmental change. This assimilation/accommodation process, interactive by nature, became the heart of Piaget's epistemology. He called it “genetic epistemology,” referring to the fact that behavior, especially, deep-seated, genomic, lasting behavior (a change of sche-mas or ways of operation), could not be imposed as the Lamarckians/Skinnerians believed, nor was it random as the Darwinists/neo-Darwinists asserted but would develop via an interaction of environment and subject (animal/person). This interaction-ist approach was applauded by Ilya Prigogine, an early contributor to chaos and complexity theories, and is much appreciated by Dewey scholars who emphasize inter- (or trans-) action as the way children learn.

Piaget believed that children's learning is organized around their ability, over time, to develop logical and abstract thinkingfor him (as a logician), the epitome of adult thinking. His stages (really schemas or ways of operation) are senso-rimotor (02) where the child coordinates bodily reflexes; preoperational (26/7) where the child focuses on self; concrete operational (6/711/12) where the child/youth begins to develop a systems view, becoming aware of more than self but limited in this thinking to concrete instances; and formal operational (11/12) where (ideally) mature, abstract, rigorous, logical thinking becomes operational. The sense of “progression” in this process captivated U.S. audiences, especially childhood teachers and theorists. “Developmentally appropriate practices,” became a mantra for childhood educators. Childhood educators found themselves caughtthey wanted to use operations that fit the stages the child was in; parents and often administrators want to “aid” the child to move through the stages quickly. The American way, as Piaget labeled it, was to move children as quickly as possible through the stages. Piaget, though, with his firm grounding in a biological, interactionist processone where the genome has its own ways of operation, and maintaining his theory of genetic epistemology, affirmed that one could not “teach” a child out of one stage and into the next. Movement of this sort happens not by force or even by enticement but when the child's cognitive structure “desires” such a change. The transformation happens individually, unspecified, and “tout ensemble.”

...