Jean Piaget Quotes

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Jean Piaget

Profession : Psychologist

Birth : August 9, 1896

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.

Jean Piaget

Scientific knowledge is in perpetual evolution; it finds itself changed from one day to the next.

Jean Piaget

It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.

Jean Piaget

This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.

Jean Piaget

In other words, knowledge of the external world begins with an immediate utilisation of things, whereas knowledge of self is stopped by this purely practical and utilitarian contact.

Jean Piaget

Our problem, from the point of view of psychology and from the point of view of genetic epistemology, is to explain how the transition is made from a lower level of knowledge to a level that is judged to be higher.

Jean Piaget

To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active.

Jean Piaget

I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother's poor mental health.

Jean Piaget

The current state of knowledge is a moment in history, changing just as rapidly as the state of knowledge in the past has ever changed and, in many instances, more rapidly.

Jean Piaget

The main functions of intelligence, that of inventing solutions and that of verifying them, do not necessarily involve one another. The first partakes of imagination; the second alone is properly logical.

Jean Piaget

Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do: when neither innateness nor learning has prepared you for the particular situation.

Jean Piaget

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.

Jean Piaget

Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.

Jean Piaget

Logical reasoning is an argument which we have with ourselves and which reproduces internally the features of a real argument.

Jean Piaget

Before playing with his equals, the child is influenced by his parents. He is subjected from his cradle to a multiplicity of regulations, and even before language he becomes conscious of certain obligations.

Jean Piaget

Every acquisition of accommodation becomes material for assimilation, but assimilation always resists new accommodations.

Jean Piaget

The more the schemata are differentiated, the smaller the gap between the new and the familiar becomes, so that novelty, instead of constituting an annoyance avoided by the subject, becomes a problem and invites searching.

Jean Piaget

Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.

Jean Piaget

Play is the answer to the question, 'How does anything new come about?'

Jean Piaget

From this time on, the universe is built up into an aggregate of permanent objects connected by causal relations that are independent of the subject and are placed in objective space and time.

Jean Piaget