Jean Piaget. Notes on Learning.pdf

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extracted text: ■ New ideas on education and the instruction of the young have been receiving a great deal of atten tion in Europe and in the U.S.A. Filipino educators need to be aware of them. JEAN PIAGET: NOTES ON LEARNING The man behind the ideas of many of the plans and programs to improve the cur ricula in the schools is not an educator. Jean Piaget is the s ev e n t y-one-year-o 1 d French-speaking Swiss direc tor of the Jean Jacques Rous seau Institute in Geneva, the founding director of the In ternational Center for Gene tic Epistemology, director of the International Bureau of Education, and professor of child psychology and of the history of scientific thought at the University of Geneva. Some psychologists are con vinced that his work might become as influential as Freud’s. Some educators are fearful that this may be true. In March, Piaget came to U.S.A, to deliver three lec tures on the nature and nur ture of intelligence and on related matters in science, psychology, and education. He spoke at New York Uni versity and addressed the convention of the American Orthopsychiatric Association in Washington. It has been said of Piaget that he is by vocation a socio logist, by avocation an epistemologist, and by method a logician. He tells his listen ers and readers that he is not an educator, that he is a psy chologist with an interdis ciplinary bent, that he is an investigator using the tools of the related fields of bio logy, psychology, and logic to explore the genesis of intel ligence in the human young. All his long life he has drawn upon these three fields to conduct research and to build his theories of the develop ment of intelligence in child, ren. For Piaget, the crucial question in the study of the growing child is how he ad justs himself to the world in which he lives. And for Pia get there is nothing pejora tive in the word adjustment. It involves backing and fill ing, winning and losing, un 38 Panorama demanding and gaining knowledge. As he expresses it: “Knowledge is not a copy of reality. To know an ob ject, to know an event, is not simply to look at it and make a mental copy, or image, of it. To know an object is to act on it. To know is to mo dify, to transform the object, and to understand the pro cess of this transformation, and as a consequence to un derstand the way the object is constructed. An operation is thus the essence of know ledge.” This is the voice of the epistemologist, but it speaks from the soul of the teacher. Piaget’s techniques for ob serving, recording, and un derstanding the way a child things is quite literally to get inside of' the child’s mind and see the world through the child’s eyes. One of his notable experiments, for example, was to join in a child’s game as an equal. He would “learn how to make a good shot at marbles, how to make bad ones, and even how to cheat.” Piaget sees four major stages of growth through childhood: the first is the sensory-motor stage, which lasts from birth to about two years. Here the child learns muscles and senses and dev elops certain habits for deal ing with external objects and events. Language begins to gain form. He can deal with and know that things exist even when they are beyond his sight or touch. He be gins to “symbolize,” to repre sent things by word or ges ture. The second stage is the preoperational or representa tional stage. It begins with the beginning of organized language and continues to about the age of six. This is the period of greatest lan guage growth and through the use of word and other symbols the child can repre sent the outside world and his own inner world of feel ing. It is a period when ma gical explanations make sense, when “God pushes the sun around” and stars must go to bed when he does. The child begins to gain a sense of symmetry, depends on trial and error adjustments, and manages things by a kind of intuitive regulation. The third stage, between seven and eleven years, is September 1967 39 one in which the child ac quires the ability to carry out what Piaget calls concrete operations. He can move things around, make them fit properly. He acquires fine motor skills and can or ganize what he has and knows how to solve physical problems. The fourth stage is one of formal operations and pre pares the way for adult thinking. It usually begins between twelve and fifteen years and involves the dev elopment of ‘‘hypothetical reasoning based upon a logic of all possible combinations and to perform controlled experimentation.” In successive studies Pia get and his associates have explored the growth of in telligence, the development of mora'l awareness, the child’s concept of physical reality, and the elaboration of appropriate logic to deal with complex nonrepresentational problems. Although The Language and Thought of the Child was published in English in 1926, it was not until the early 1950s that Piaget’s ideas made any significant impact in the United States. Professor Jerome S. Bruner of Harvard is probably res ponsible for the current public awareness, which can be traced to his important little book The Process of Education (1960), and his most recent book, Toward a Theory of Instruction (1966). Bruner describes Piaget as “unquestionably, the most impressive figure in the field of cognitive development.” Piaget, he says “is often in terpreted in the wrong way by those who think that his principal mission is psycho logical. It is not . . . What he has done is to write the implicit logical theory on which the child proceeds in dealing with intellectual tasks.” Some of Piagets Ideas 1. “If we accept the fact that there are stages of dev elopment, another question arises, which I call 'the Am erican question,’ and I’m asked it every time I come here: If there are stages that children reach at given norms of ages, can we accelerate these stages? Do we have to go through each one of these stages, or can’t we speed it up a bit? Well, surely, the answer is yes ... . but how 40 Panorama far can we speed them up? “A few years ago (Jerome S.) Bruner made a claim which has always astounded me; namely, that you can teach anything in an intel lectually honest way to any child of any age if you go about it the right way. Well, 1 don’t know if he still be lieves that. But I have a hypothesis that I am so far incapable of proving: Pro bably the organization of operations has an optimal time . For example, we know that it takes nine to twelve month before babies develop the notion that an object is still there even when a screen is placed in front of it. Now kittens go through the same stages as children, all the same sub-stages, but they do it in three months — so they’re six months ahead of babies. Is this an advantage or isn’t it? We can certainly see our answer in one sense. The kitten is not going to go much fur ther. The child has taken longer, but he is capable of going further, so it seems to me that the nine months probably were not for nothing. “It’s problably possible to accelerate, but maximal acce leration is not desirable. There seems to be an opti mal time. What this opti mal time is will surely de pend upon each individual and on the subject matter. We still need a great deal of research to know what the optimal time would be.” 2. “Should schools attempt to create individuals who are capable of understanding everything that has been done in the history of ideas, and capable of repeating all this history, or should they focus on forming individuals who are capable of inventing, of finding new things in all areas: in modest technical inventions, or in more highly developed scientific inven tions — that is, people who are capable of going beyond the present and previous generations? This gives us the alternative between two types of pedagogy, one in which the child is receptive, the other in which he is active — education which sti mulates the activities of the child in the area of his in ventiveness.” 3. “Intelligence is born of action. Any act of intelli gence — whether it be on the part of a man involved in September 1967 41 scientific research, or of any normal adult in his everyday problem-solving, or the child of seven and eight — any act of intelligence consists of operations, carrying out ope rations, and coordinating them among themselves.” 4. “Even in order to un dersand we have to invent, or, that is, to reinvent, be cause we can’t start from the beginning again. But I would say that anything is only understood to the ex tent that it is reinvented.” 5. “Each of the stages (of learning) is essential for the development of the follow ing stages. This isn’t simply a linear order in which you could jump over one stage and still get to the next one. Each stage integrates the pre ceding stage and prepares the way for the following one.” — By Frank G. Jennings, Ex tracts from Saturday Review, May 20, 1967. 42 Panorama
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