Life Jean Piaget wrote his first paper at the age of ten, this amazing human is one of the most influential figure in the psychology world, one of his most famous work is the theory of The Sensorimotor Stage which I will write about in a few moments. When he was in high school he landed a part time job with the director Mr. Godel at the Nuechâtel’s Museum of Natural History, he claimed that all his work and experience with science kept him away from “the demon of philosophy” (Piaget), while at the Museum, he was mostly attending students of mollusk, who actually saw him as an adult.
He went on to receive his Doctorate in Science diploma from the University of of Neuchâtel in 1918 and worked and worked for a year in a psychology lab and it was in that period he received knowledge of Fraud and Jung, in 1919 he went on to teach psychology in it was more interested in how children reasons and conducted a study of his on not showin to much interest on the right-wrong type of tests, which he took part of with Simon.
I’ll though I’m not sure, It’s probably around that time where the beginning of his Schemas and The Sensorimotor Stage. He married his coworker student, Valentine Châtenay and together they had three children, Jacqueline Piaget born in 1925, Lucienne Piaget born in 1927 and Laurent Piaget born in 1928, and no need to say that all three kids was on constant observation from their parents. In 1929 he worked as a director of the International Bureau of Education, where he would stay until 1967.
Along that period he was also chair of Experimental Psychology, director of psychology laboratory and president of the Swiss Society of Psychology, that started in 1940. In 1942 he lecture at the Collège de France, which was Nazi occupied at the time. He took a position as professor at Sorbonne, created the International Center of Genetics Epistemology in 1955 and in 1956 created the School of Science at the University of Geneva. He continued his work and published over 60 books through his life until he passed away in Geneva on, September 16, 1980.
Theories Albert once said, that Paige’s discoveries o cognitive development was so simple, that only a genius could have think of it. To me is not as simple, however I think that because Piaget look for his theories at the most obvious place it made seems like it was simple, well maybe to a genius, not my case.
I have always thought that the answer to most of our psychological development could be found in our children, by watching how they act and interact with other, and on how the overcome situations I saw a video from Sir Ken Robinson’s where he talked about how school should nurture child’s ambition and instead they squander them, Paiget also questioned if we should form children who are only capable of learning what they know ore if we should try to develop creative and motivated minds, I know it is a bit side track but I wanted to mentioned here the similarities I found and how I also think of somewhat the same. Piaget’s theories on schema, the cognitive structure that represents knowledge about everything we know, was that as the child would experience more, schema would eventually change, the child would modify or maybe even add changes to the existing schemas.
Piaget broke that theory into 3 parts;
- Assimilation, where you use a pre-existing information to deal with a new experience;
- Accommodation, for example you may see a box made out of would, but after you touch it you realize is printed paper;
- Equilibrium, is basically the child’s attempt to balance both assimilation and accommodation.
The most important part is the stage of development it is divide into four stages.
- Sensorimotor stage, is the idea of permanence, it means that the object still exists even if it is out of view;
- Pre-operational stag, children begins to develop imagination and things will have more meaning;
- Concrete operational stage; according to Piaget, this is where the child begins to showcase logical and operational thinking;
- Formal operational stage, is where logical thinking starts to increase using deductive reasoning and also understanding abstract.
