Early Years Pioneers: Jean Piaget

Who was Jean Piaget?

Jean Piaget was born in Neuchatel, Switzerland, in 1896. By the age of 12 he had published a scholarly article about albino sparrows and by the time of his death, in 1980, he had produced more than 60 books and hundreds of papers.

Having graduated and gained a doctorate in science, Piaget took up a university research post in Paris in 1919, in the famous psychology laboratory of Alfred Binet. His job was to translate standardised British intelligence tests into French. What Piaget noticed was that children's errors often followed similar patterns, and this set him on a lifelong quest to understand and explain children's thought processes.

In reality Jean Piaget was an epis-temologist - someone who studies the nature of knowledge and knowing. Keen to understand early childhood, Piaget and his wife Valentine, who was a psychologist, began diaries recording in fine detail the patterns in the behaviour of their children, Jacqueline, Lucienne and Laurent.

What did Jean Piaget achieve?

While Piaget's work has undoubtedly influenced worldwide thinking about young children's learning, he should perhaps be given the greatest credit for being the key figure who changed Western European ideas about children's early cognitive development.

He also attracted many psychologists from different countries to join his research team in Geneva, while others have furthered his research through their own thoughtful experiments and observations. Psychologists still acknowledge his genius and his continuing contribution in the themes set for future research.

Experiments with children

Piaget's early work, in the 1920s, focused on theory of mind - how children make sense of their own and others' minds, that is, how children's social and cognitive (perhaps also emotional) development interweaves. However, he then began a long phase of research involving experimental work on cognitive development, and in particular on how children understand physical phenomena. Piaget would present children with various simple tasks so that he could expose the reasoning that led to their answers. He would look for common patterns in their reasoning and, from these clues, theorise about the existence of an underlying developmentally determined, logical structure.

These tasks involved, for example, showing a child two similar glasses of water, pouring the water from one into a shorter wider glass and then asking which glass held more water.Another was to show children a bunch of flowers comprising, say, seven roses and three lilies, and ask if there were more flowers or more roses.

Critics have subsequently argued that such problems are difficult for young children as a result of the language used, rather than cognitive factors. I have much sympathy with this criticism, since I well remember an incident in a school playground when I was six, where another child asked me, 'Which is heavier, a ton of bricks or a ton of feathers?' I quickly said 'Bricks.'

My questioner laughed and I immediately understood how I had been tricked.

Theories about children's development

Although Piaget theorised about a number of different areas of child development, his idea that there are relatively fixed stages in the development of children's thinking were at their most influential in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s. Piaget had also concluded that babies and young children see the world in a different way from adults but that their view is just as complex and highly structured. For example, he suggested babies think that objects, including people, cease to exist when out of sight (object permanence). He argued that children are born with a powerful mechanism for adjusting their view of the world in the light of further experience.

Some of Piaget's early ideas had been challenged by Susan Isaacs (see Nursery World, 20 January 2005) and accounts of their correspondence, based on her observations of children's play and exploration, can be found in her publications. As his ideas gained prominence, Piaget's work was interpreted in the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) field as meaning that children learn best when provided with a rich environment in which to play, explore, and experiment as 'lone scientists'. This resulted in a period when even interventions to scaffold children's thinking would be seen as too formal and didactic.

However, certain early childhood professionals observed that children also enjoyed and benefited from group play, conversation and learning which the Piagetian approach appeared to omit. Thus, over the last 35 years Vygotsky's theory that learning is a social activity has been invoked to support the embracing of both sets of ideas.

Jean Piaget's influence on education in the UK

Piaget's contacts in the UK recognised the influence his theories might have upon not just ECEC but also on the whole of primary education. The idea that children should be given opportunities to explore, experiment, reflect, and transform knowledge, rather than merely being 'filled up' with the knowledge in a teacher's head or in books, excited some educators. His work provided support for the members of the review board which produced the Plowden Report for the Government in 1967, enabling them to advocate discovery learning.

Subsequent inspectors' reports show that only about 10 per cent of primary schools adopted such approaches. But certain key figures relished and encouraged what became known as informal, or child-centred education.

Unfortunately, despite being shown to be effective when adopted competently, the approach attracted criticism in the late 1960s and 1970s, and since then most primary schools have felt forced to return to a model of education which, as the poet Yeats complained, is about 'filling buckets' rather than 'lighting fires'. Thankfully, learning through play and talk continues to be advocated as the most appropriate approach for the Foundation Stage. NW

Tricia David is Emeritus Professor of Education at Canterbury Christ Church University and Honorary Emeritus Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Sheffield

Suggested reading

• Gopnik, A, Meltzoff, A and Kuhl, P (1999) How Babies Think. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
• McNaughton, G (2003) Shaping Early Childhood. Maidenhead: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill
• Piaget, J and Inhelder, B (1969) The Psychology of the Child. Washington DC: Prentice-Hall
• The Jean Piaget Society website: www.piaget.org