Background

Ethnicity: Piaget's father was Swiss while his mother was French.

Jean Piaget was born on August 9, 1896, in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He was his parents' first child. Piaget’s mother, Rebecca Jackson, attributed his intense early interest in the sciences to his own neurotic tendencies. Yet his father, a medieval literature professor named Arthur, modeled a passionate dedication to his studies - a trait that Piaget began to emulate from an early age.

Education

At just 10 years old, Piaget's fascination with mollusks drew him to the local museum of natural history, where he stared at specimens for hours on end.

When he was 11 and attending Neuchâtel Latin High School, Piaget wrote a short scientific paper on the albino sparrow. By the time he was a teen, his papers on mollusks were being widely published. Piaget's readers were unaware of his age and considered him an expert on the topic.

He attended the University of Neuchâtel studying zoology and philosophy where he obtained his doctorate in 1918, and later, enrolled for a semester at the University of Zürich where he became interested in psychology.

Even as a young student, Piaget wrote two philosophical papers that were unfortunately rejected as adolescent thoughts.

Career

Piaget worked for a year at a boys' institution created by Alfred Binet in France where he standardized Burt’s test of intelligence and began his studies on children’s mental development. He became a research director of studies at the Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Geneva in 1921.

From 1925 to 1929 Piaget was a professor of psychology, sociology, and the philosophy of science at the University of Neuchâtel. From 1929 to 1939 he served as professor of the history of scientific thought at the University of Geneva.

In 1929 Piaget accepted the position of director at the International Bureau of Education, Geneva. He held the position of director of the Institute of Educational Sciences by the University of Geneva from 1932 to 1971. Simultaneously he had a professorship at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland from 1938 to 1951.

Piaget also became a professor of sociology (1939-1951), and professor of experimental psychology (1940-1971) at the University of Geneva. From 1952 to 1964 he was also a professor of genetic psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris. From 1955 to 1980 Piaget served as director of the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology, Geneva.

He accepted the position of professor emeritus at the University of Geneva in 1971 and remained at the university until his death.

In 1972 Jean Piaget was awarded Erasmus Prize. In 1979 he was honored with the Balzan Prize for Social and Political Sciences. The following year, he died on September 16, 1980. He was 84 years old.

Achievements

• Piaget was one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century who was best known for propounding the theory of cognitive development. He influenced the works of future generations of eminent psychologists studying not just human behavior, but also the behavior of non-human species like primates.
  
  Piaget was the recipient of an array of honorary degrees and accolades, including the prestigious Erasmus (1972) and Balzan (1979) prizes. The author of more than 50 books and hundreds of papers, Piaget summed up his passion for the ongoing pursuit of scientific knowledge with these words: "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."

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Moral Judgment of the Child

    (This book chronicles the evolution of children's moral th...)

    1932
  • Play Dreams & Imitation in Childhood

    (A study of child development in terms of systematic and r...)

    1945
  • The Child's Conception Of The World

    (A study of the conception that children form during diffe...)

    1926
  • The Psychology Of The Child 1966
  • The Language and Thought of the Child 1923

Religion

The crises of faith in Piaget's adolescence led to a shift away from belief in the transcendent, personal God who created the world and set its rules of existence. His 1928 publication entitled, Two Types of Religious Attitude: Immanence and Transcendence, sheds light on this change. Here, he argued that recognition of divine immanence, in which God is found within the person in the form of thought or consciousness, should be regarded as more evolved than belief in a transcendent God. Moving to a belief in divine immanence resolved Piaget's dilemma regarding the relationship between faith and science, allowing him to proceed in his quest for a biological explanation of the development of knowledge.

However, the loss of belief in a personal God may have contributed to his limited understanding of the purpose of human life, or God's ideal of creation, and so resulted in the failure of his theory, and those subsequently building upon his work, to grasp the importance of love, human relationships, and spirituality in human development.

It has also been suggested that Piaget may have deliberately obscured his religious beliefs in order to have his work received by the scholarly community of scientists and psychologists committed to atheistic assumptions. In support of this argument, Piaget wrote in his autobiography (1952) that he had expected his psychological research to be concluded in a matter of five years, whereupon he would return to complete his work in developing genetic epistemology. It is within this larger framework that his religious, even mystical, understandings could have been more prominent as he sought to chart the development of not only cognitive knowledge but also moral and spiritual values in human beings.

Politics

Piaget wasn't involved in politics.

Views

According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all subsequent learning and knowledge are based.

Piaget's research was focused on the goal of discovering how knowledge develops. He viewed children as little philosophers and scientists building their own individual theories of knowledge based on logical structures that develop over time and through experience. Thus, children of different ages view the world in entirely different ways from adults.

Piaget is best known for organizing cognitive development into a series of stages - the levels of development corresponding to infancy, early childhood, later childhood, and adolescence. These four stages are called the Sensorimotor stage, which occurs from birth to age two (children experience through their senses), the Preoperational stage, which occurs from ages two to seven (motor skills are acquired), the Concrete Operational stage, which occurs from ages seven to eleven (children think logically about concrete events), and the Formal Operational stage, which occurs after age eleven (abstract reasoning is developed here). Advancement through these levels occurs through the interaction of biological factors and experience; through a mechanism, he called "equilibration." He believed that children (and indeed adults) are continually generating theories about the external world (which are kept or dismissed depending on whether we see them working in practice).

Quotations: "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."

Interests

• Reading

Connections

In 1923, Jean Piaget married Valentine Châtenay and they had three children, Jacqueline, Lucienne, and Laurent.

Father:

Arthur Piaget

Mother:

Rebecca Jackson

Spouse:

Valentine Châtenay

Daughter:

Jacqueline Piaget

Son:

Laurent Piaget

Daughter:

Lucienne Piaget

References

• Jean Piaget and Neuchâtel: The Learner and the Scholar
  2007