Nursery World - To the Point - Making the wheels turn

Occasionally, an encounter between two people plus a chance observation can change the world. It is no exaggeration to make this claim for what happened when the psychologist Jean Piaget met Susan Isaacs in the 1920s.

At that time, Piaget was conducting highly structured investigations into how young children develop knowledge. Isaacs had set up the Malting House School in Cambridge in 1924 and was experimenting with an approach to education that allowed children a high degree of freedom to choose, play and decide for themselves what they wanted to learn. Piaget's investigations had demonstrated, to his satisfaction, the 'fact' that children under the age of eight could not grasp the idea of mechanical causality. He had come to this conclusion after undertaking large numbers of interviews with young children. But just as he was explaining his theories to Susan Isaacs in her school garden, the two adults came across a five-year-old boy on his tricycle.

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