Piaget, Jean (1896–1980)

Contributions to Education Reform

Piaget significantly influenced elementary education with the idea that individuals construct their own understanding of reality. His understanding that individuals are active learners who modify and transform information through their engagement with that knowledge provides the foundation for the pervasive constructivist movement in contemporary education, which constituted one of the most [Page 709]significant and controversial reform efforts of the late 20th century. In Piagetian theory, children are not passive recipients of information, but active participants in the learning process who construct their own meaning.

Piaget influenced elementary education in a number of ways. First, the children's stage of development limits what they can learn. For instance, children cannot solve abstract problems until the last cognitive stage, formal operational, that begins around the age of 11. Second, what children learn in later stages is affected by what they learned and the cognitive structures that they developed in the earlier stages. Therefore, opportunities must be provided that facilitate the full cognitive development of the child in each stage. Third, the important part of a child's learning is the child's ability to apply or transfer what was already learned to the new information. Fourth, children cannot apply what they learned in a previous stage until they have developed the physical brain structures that will allow the next level of learning to take place. Finally, requiring students to learn information that is beyond their stage of cognitive development is a futile learning experience. For instance, no amount of practice in learning algebra will help middle-school students who are not yet in the formal operational stage.

Constructivist education takes its name from Piaget's research showing that children actively create—construct—new knowledge from their experiences that goes beyond what they already know. The following main ideas from Piaget's research and theory are relevant to education:

• Children construct knowledge.
• Interest is necessary for the constructive process to begin and continue.
• Experimentation with physical phenomena is essential to the constructive process.
• Cooperation characterizes the interpersonal atmosphere in which the constructive process thrives.

A challenge for constructivist teachers is to identify content that intrigues children and arouses their curiosity. Cooperation, according to Piaget, refers to the type of social context necessary for optimal development of intelligence or knowledge, and of emotional, social, and moral aspects of personality. By “cooperation,” Piaget did not mean submissive compliance. For Piaget, cooperation is an essential characteristic of active education that respects the ways in which children think and the ways they transform their thinking by making new mental relationships. Mutual respect creates the basic dynamic in which individuals want and try to cooperate—that is, to operate in terms of one another's desires and ideas.

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