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OBITUARY Jean Piaget Dies in By ALDEN WHITMAN SEPT.
16 - Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist whose study of child development has
often been compared to Freud's work in its vast influence on the science of
human intelligence, died in Dr.
Piaget was hospitalized 10 days ago at The
question to which Jean Piaget addressed himself was deceptively obvious and
simple: How does a child learn? His answer, often phrased in obtuse language,
was in brief that a child learns by discrete stages related to age and that
he is a significant agent in the process. His
stress on the interaction of biological functions and the structure of the
environment, elaborated in more than 60 years of research, was, in the
opinion of many psychologists and education specialists, as liberating and as
revolutionary as Sigmund Freud's earlier insights into the stage development
of human emotional life. Many hailed him as one of the century's most
creative scientific thinkers. And
indeed Dr. Piaget's theories exercised a profound effect on thinking about
children in In
contrast to the traditional views of how we acquire knowledge--that heredity
plays a dominant role or that environmental factors are controlling--Dr.
Piaget proposed that each child, starting from birth, constructs and
reconstructs his very own model of reality, of the world about him, in a
regular sequence. He does this through a multitude of direct experiences with
persons and objects, in the course of which cognitive growth takes place not
merely by amassing new facts. The child's transformation of these experiences
into conceptions is constantly revised through his own self- discoveries,
which tend to eliminate errors in previous conceptions. A
simple example of this phenomenon was cited recently by Dr. David Elkind of "The
child of 3 or 4 already has an elementary concept of quantity: confronted
with two identical glasses of orangeade filled to the same level, he would
say that both had the 'same to drink.' But if the orangeade from one glass
were poured into a tall, narrow beaker while he looked on, the child would
say, Piaget found, that the tall glass had 'more to drink' than the shorter
one. "Not
until about 6 or 7 do most children understand that changing the shape of a
quantity does not change the amount. The young child has a concept of
quantity, but it is clearly a different concept from the one held by older
children and adults: he thinks the amount of liquid can be gauged by its
level without taking its width into account. Older children and adults,
however, assess liquid quantities by taking both height and width into
consideration. Mental Growth by Integration "This
is mental growth by integration, wherein a new, higher-level idea (amount is
determined by height and width) is formed by the integration of two
lower-level ideas (amount is determined by height or width). It suggests that
mental growth is an expanding upward spiral in which the same problems are
attacked at successive levels but are resolved more completely and more
successfully at each higher level." In
addition, Dr. Piaget explained that mental growth takes place by integration
of diverse concepts and replacement or primitive notions of nature by more
mature ideas with age. Thus, very young children tend to believe that the sun
and the moon follow them around, a notion that is replaced in later years. Four Stages of Growth Four
major stages of mental growth were delineated by Dr. Piaget, based on the
cognitive tasks accomplished in each. In
the sensory-motor period--the initial two years of life--the child is chiefly
concerned with the mastery of objects, blocks, large toys, rocks, household
objects and the like. From 2 to 6, his main concern is with symbols such as
those in language, fantasy, dreams and play. For about the next five or six
years, or until age 12, the child learns to master numbers, relations and
classes and how to reason about them. Finally, in the three years to age 15,
he is occupied with the mastering of purely logical thought, and he can think
about his own thinking and that of others. The continuum, in Dr. Piaget's
presentation, is quite complex, yet each stage has its telltale characteristics. A
number of hardy theories were challenged by Dr. Piaget's work: that a child
is a little adult; that ideas are inborn; that learning takes place by
environmental conditioning or reinforcement; that the young child is capable
of absorbing facts as they are understood by adults; and that he copies the
world about him. In place of these notions, Dr. Piaget sought to substitute
what he called genetic epistemology. In
this concept, the timetable that appears to underlie the development of
intellectual skills indicates that the capacity for logical thought is coded,
along with sex, eye color and the shape of the nose, in the genes. Rational
tendencies, however, do not mature simply because they are innate; rather,
they grow with use. The
application of this theory in education stresses the importance of what is
called the "discovery method" of teaching, in which a child gets an
opportunity to apply his developing abilities and test their limitations. The
teacher is a guide, not a force-feeder of ready-made truths. "The
goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create
the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are
capable of doing new things," Dr. Piaget explained. Dr.
Piaget's early discoveries with children gained him worldwide acclaim in the
20 and 30's, but after that his works were considered too remote from the
dominant trends in American behavioral science. Then in the late 50's and
early 60's he was rediscovered. In the last few years most of his basic works
have been translated and several explications for the general reader have
been published. The most accessible of Dr. Piaget's own works are "Six
Psychological Studies" and "The Psychology of the Child;"
books about him include "Understanding Piaget," "The Essential
Piaget" and "An Outline of Piaget's Developmental Psychology for
Students and Teachers." Along
with an enthusiasm for Dr. Piaget in some American academic and educational
circles there has been criticism. Traditionalists objected to the radical way
he conceived of the child's task of acquiring knowledge. And many sympathetic
with Dr. Piaget's overall interpretation feel alternative interpretations can
be put forth for many of the phenomena he uncovered. Other critics also
argued that his theory offered little help in clarifying the motivations and
accomplishments of individual children. Many critics, however, agreed with
Robert Coles of Harvard that Dr. Piaget had focused psychologists' attention
on "man the developing thinker rather than on man the universal
neurotic." Tall,
portly and rumpled-looking in his bulky suits, Dr. Piaget resembled a
magnified Einstein, an impression that was accented by his bushy white hair.
Out of doors he covered part of this unruly mane with a navy blue beret. To
many who met him, according to Professor Elkind,
Dr. Piaget gave off "an aura of intellectual presence not unlike the
aura of a dramatic presence emanated by a great actor." Smoking a
meerschaum and chatting with friends--and especially with children--he seemed
benign and gracious, but members of his staff in Followed a Strict Schedule For
years he followed a strict schedule. Up at In
the summer he departed to an Alpine retreat to talk, meditate and write.
Apart from articles and lectures, his output totaled more than 50 books and
monographs. Several of them, including "The Child's Conception of
Space" and "The Growth of Logical Thinking From Childhood to
Adolescence," were written with Barbel Inhelder, his longtime associate at the Dr.
Piaget's road to child psychology started with a youthful interest in zoology.
The son of specialist on the Middle Ages, he was born In
1920 he went to Inside the Child's Mind Possessed
of a remarkable empathy with children, he spent long hours on his hands and
knees shooting marbles with them, exploring their notions of space, ethics,
numbers and the like. From these observations came his first book, "The
Language and Thought of The Child," which traced the development of
child's speech from egocentric to socialized forms. His
researches in psychology spanning over a half-century built up an impressive
body of insights. His basic approach was to get inside of the child's mind
and see the world through its eyes. "I engage my subjects in
conversation," Dr. Piaget recounted, "patterned after psychiatric
questioning, with the aim of discovering something about the reasoning
underlying their right but especially their wrong answers." Among
other things, he found that "children not only reasoned differently from
adults, but also that they had quite different world views, literally
different philosophies." For example, he noted that in a child's view
"objects like stones and clouds are imbued with motives, intentions and
feelings." The mind is thus not a passive mirror but an active artist as
it develops increasingly sophisticated versions of reality. The
unfolding of Dr. Piaget's explanations occurred over a lifetime, so there
were refinements as new evidence was sifted; but these did not alter his
basic theories. The
elaboration of these was institutionalized in the In
his mature years Dr. Piaget was widely acclaimed. There were honorary degrees
from dozens of universities, including |
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